Judging Freedom - Ray McGovern: CIA and German Propaganda

Episode Date: March 18, 2024

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Thank you. Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Monday, March 18th, 2024. Ray McGovern joins us now. Ray, my dear friend, thank you for your time and for your thoughts. We have a lot to talk about. I want to focus mainly on Russia, Ukraine, my dear friend, thank you for your time and for your thoughts. We have a lot to talk about. I want to focus mainly on Russia, Ukraine, and Europe. Let's begin with something that you and I emailed each other about over the weekend, this crazy story of German intel leaking, supposedly, information that Russia is preparing to commence World War III in five years. This sounds fanciful, but it got picked up by the mainstream media. What do you make of this type of thing? Judge, German intel is no different from what has become of the CIA and other intelligence agencies. They're pretty much cat's paws for the military-industrial complex.

The people who are making money on building and selling arms are in the driver's seat now. There's no indication, I repeat, no indication that the Russians are going to attack the rest of Europe. The annual threat assessment put out by active Congress every year has not a smallest trace of any prediction or any suggestion that the Russians are going to attack Poland or the Baltic Sea or anything else. So this is all just kind of budgetary intelligence trying to build up the European armaments factories,

while at the same time saying to our Congress, look, the Europeans are doing their part. Now all we have to do is come through with $60 billion more for Ukraine, and that will get us to November. And as far as the administration is concerned, that will prevent us from, maybe prevent us from losing the war and the election. Before we get to that threat assessment, which with the process of which I know you're familiar, you at one point participated in them. What do you think happens to NATO when Ukraine loses this war to Russia?

It's really a defeat of NATO, is it not? It is. And NATO will never be the same. Now, it will take years to dissolve or dissipate. That mostly has to do with the bureaucracy. There are a lot of good jobs that they do, a lot of really fancy buildings and so forth. But it's pretty much gone because what Biden is saying to them, even very publicly, look, we're not going to put soldiers, troops in Ukraine. Okay.

Well, that means that these Swedes and these Finns that were relying on the U.S. to come in with troops and everything else in case they're attacked, in the unlikely case they're attacked, well, maybe that was a bad idea to come into NATO. What's NATO worth to these people anymore if the United States will not put troops on the ground? Now, if Putin wanted to go into Poland, I don't know why he'd do that, or into the Baltic States or any other NATO member, then it would be the automatic putting in place of that mutual

defense obligation. He had no intention of doing that. And when people ask him, am I going to do that? He keeps saying, put your boot, put your boot. Why the hell would I do that? Why? What? The book in a sense, okay? So it's all kind of, it's political. It's designed to show that the Europeans are doing their part, you know?

They're willing to seize Russian assets, at least the interest of the Russian gold that's in Brussels now. They're willing to raise the notion that Macron might be supported by people like the Poles and like the Baltics in putting troops in Ukraine. But once they do it, Putin is saying, look, don't you get it? Once you do that, you're at war with Russia, okay? And we have all manner of ways to take care of you, even places like Paris, Berlin, wherever, we can strike them. And that doesn't necessarily have to be a nuclear weapon.

If push comes to shove, it could be. But these weapons are so accurate and they're so powerful, these hypersonic missiles, that they would use those first, I'm pretty sure, rather than risk the kind of escalation that would go to a nuclear war. What do you think would become of NATO if Donald Trump, as elected president, pulls the United States out? Then NATO would have to grow up. NATO would have to be the adults. NATO would have to say, are we really afraid of the Russians that they're going to attack Poland or the Baltic states?

And they already know that that's not in the cards. What will their arms manufacturers do if there's no enemy on the other side of Europe in the Urals? Well, it's a complicated thing, but it's going to be very hard to persuade the European people, suffering as they are from economic problems, that, oh, we need to devote more money to defend ourselves against Russia, when people with more level heads will say, Russia won't have anything to do with trying to conquer us. All they wanted was a cordon sanitaire, a kind of zone between NATO and Russia, and that happened to be called Ukraine. Ukraine. What do you make of the presidential election over the weekend? In the West, of course, they're mocking it. Mainstream media is saying it means nothing. He had no opponent. There was no campaign. He still only got 87% of the vote. They arrested some people for showing up with Navalny on T-shirts.

But how does Ray McGovern, with all your experience in international intelligence, view this election of Vladimir Putin? Well, I would put it this way. The only person disappointed might be Poochie because the latest polls, well-regarded polls in the West Nevada Institute, put him at 88% approval, and he ended up getting only 87% of the vote. Now, I make that as a jocular remark. Right. The guy is in there, right? He's in there for six more years.

In my view, he's predictable. And that is the cornerstone of what we need on the other side of the Atlantic, somebody who's predictable. He's laid down the line. He has red lines. He said that Russia has ever threatened itself. Or if someone uses a nuclear weapon before we do that's it we use nuclear weapons other than that we've got lots of other stuff we can put into play witness what we've been able to do in ukraine for the last two years so i see him as a as a cool calm perspicacious person who when push comes to shove will make a make a real big deal out of people like Macron in France who said, yeah, we've got to put boots on the ground there, maybe French troops and maybe others. And the polls say, well, yeah, they shouldn't rule that out.

Well, when that happens, then he reverses character and he says, look, this is the way it is. We have red lines and we don't observe red lines that you have. And if you do that with NATO troops and actually uniformed troops in Ukraine, that would be a red line for us. Expect real, real serious retaliation. Chris, play the clip that we just looked at together with Ray. I forget what the number is. Forgive me.

Right before he came on. Okay, number five. This is a portion of an hour-long interview given by President Putin shortly after he was declared the victor in his election. We are ready to use weapons including any weapons including those you mentioned if we are talking about the existence of the russian state about damaging our sovereignty and independence as to the states that say they have no red lines regarding russia they should realize that russia won't have any red lines regarding these states either. I was wrong. It was last week. It was shortly before his election. Anything in there surprise you? No, other than the very straightforward way that he came to it. You know, he sees this

as a provocation. He doesn't know any better than I do why the hell Macron is saying these outlandish things. Even John Kirby won't say them. Even John Kirby said, no, U.S. boots on the ground. You know, Judge, we've been trying to tell the Well, we wrote a key memo to him in January of last year, so 2023. And we quoted Lloyd Austin, the Secretary of Defense, saying, U.S. goal is to see a weakened Russia. The U.S. is, this is a quote, ready to move heaven and earth to help Ukraine win the war against Russia. Well, we said to the president,

can this be done without the use of nuclear weapons? The answer is no, Mr. President. If you truly don't want World War III, then you have to take that into account because Russia will not be defeated unless you decide that nuclear weapons are necessary, that's the only way you can stop. Now, this was a year and four or five months ago, January 2023. We told the president, if anybody tells you that Russia is going to be beaten in this war, tell them to look at the map and then fire them. OK, now no one took heed of what we're saying. And what we're saying now is, Mr. President, for God's sake, before you give $80 billion more to Ukraine, would you okay you'll get a straight answer maybe at least you should try the national intelligence estimate genre has pretty much gone by the board as far as i can tell instead you get this um well i won't what instead you get this turgid prose without much meaning

called the annual threat assessment before we get to the annual threat assessment. Before we get to the annual threat assessment, and we'll get to it right after this, here is cut number one, Chris. Here's President Putin. This is a portion of his victory speech. Today, history repeats itself. It's going up, but it's coming back in circles. Everything is repeating itself. And we are all comrades in arms.

And first of all, I would like to thank the citizens of Russia. We are all one team. I would like to thank all citizens of Russia who came to the polling stations and voted. I mean, I guess you can't expect him to say anything other than that. We're all one team. Be patient. We're doing well together. Ritter tells me and Professor Rissack's the same, that the Russian economy is better off

now than it was before. This is almost in Congress, before Joe Biden imposed the sanctions. Well, it is. And rather than suffer under the sanctions, Russia has become very close to autarky. In other words, they can fill their own economic needs with a lot of help from China. And that's one thing that's missing

from this threat assessment. The real threat that the United States faces is that by the maladroit steps that our policymakers have done, Russia and China are now allied in a way they have never, ever, ever been before in a virtual alliance against us. And so if we want to start a war in Ukraine or go into it bigger still, we should fully expect more trouble in the South China Sea and the Taiwan Straits. That's how much it means right now. Three wars? Well, you know, I come back to that, what was it, 60 Minutes interview. Biden's asked, Mr. Biden, Ukraine, Southwest Asia, two wars, can you handle that? And Igor Yeltsin says, we're the United States of America, the most powerful country in the history of the world, in the history of the world. Now, Judge. He does love to say that. Yeah, I mean, he believes it.

And that's why he thinks he can, you know, throw his weight around. But it can't happen anymore. Luckily, and I say this advisedly, luckily, he's got a very calm, calculating, cool customer in Vladimir Putin. He's a known quantity. The red lines are pretty clear. Whether the United States can drag this Ukraine thing out until the election is really doubtful in my view, no matter how much money they throw at it because they don't have enough Ukrainian troops, they don't have enough arms right there. It's sort of crazy. It's really these people are in a different reality.

Talk to us about the CIA annual threat assessment. What is in it and what did it say about Russia? I'm also going to ask you about Gaza and North Korea, but right now just about Russia. And bear in mind as you give your answer what's in it, should we believe it? Well, no. It's kind of a homogenized lowest common denominator of stuff you would read on CNN or MSNBC. It starts out talking about how Russia and China are violating the rules-based international order. And there's no little footnote there that says, see, this is the new rules-based, there isn't any. What is the purpose of this thing? There must be some secret parts of it that go to the president, no?

Yeah, there's a classified version, but the unclassified version pretty much resembles what goes to the president. It's every year, and when I was first doing it, the Sino-Soviet conflict was the big surprise. It had to be followed very closely. So we led it in 1965, and we were writing for Clark Clifford, who was head of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board at the time, PIFIAB, which was a big deal. Now it's a given to Congress and it's sort of defended in a way by those- What did it say about Russia? What did it tell the president or the American public that we

don't already know? Is it this nonsense that after he, quote, takes Ukraine, he's going to go into Poland? Is it as absurd as that or a bit more professional and fact-based? Well, the deal is it doesn't say anything about Putin having greater ambitions than to consolidate his rule in Ukraine or consolidate his gains in Ukraine. In other words, the president is either imagining this or he's getting this from some other place. But apparently he's been told or affirmed in thinking that now he can't stop Putin, can't stop Russia, he's going to go all the way to the Atlantic Ocean. The British call it bollocks. I think they're playing BS. You know, it's crazy. They have no intention of doing that.

And the idea is, well, if we could get Congress to approve $60 billion more. Right, right. Well, there's more to it. It's budgetary intelligence. I think you put your finger on it, Ray. This is intended to goose more money out of the Congress. What did it say about Gaza? Well, the interesting thing is there was a thing on Gaza Today. It said, well, you know, Netanyahu may not be long for this world,

and it's very complicated business, and the rest you could read in CNN. The main point is that last year there was no section on the Middle East or Southwest Asia, if you will. No section. Why? Well, because Sullivan, Jacob Sullivan, who actually is running the CIA and what it says to the president, he was convinced that the Middle East has never been so calm. We have that quote. I don't even want to play it. He looks foolish. Of course, he couldn't have predicted

unless he had the intel what was going to happen. I think he should have been able to. I mean, if they had intelligence capabilities that were paying for megabucks, $80 billion a year. What did the CIA threat assessment say about North Korea,

Ray? Well, they say about North Korea, Ray? Well, they said that North Korea has a bunch of weapons that they tested, a lot of liquid-fueled weapons, and they have a solid-fuel weapon, which has swung at 18, period. Now, this latest weapon, which has now been tested, has been given to them by Vladimir Putin and the Russians. It is one of their late model ICBMs. It has shaft containers and everything else, decoys to defy ABM systems. And most important, it's mobile.

So unless you find it right before it fires its missile. How far can it go? Can it reach Los Angeles? It can reach Miami Beach or Palm Beach. It can reach all of the continental United States. Now, they've had that capability before, but never, never from such a sophisticated weapon. I am shocked that Vladimir Putin would give this to any other country, North Korea especially, maybe. But he's done it.

And nobody's willing to face into that except some of the advisors I have who have been around a long time and know what this means and tell me, look, Ray, this is really dangerous because unless Putin has some sort of fail-safe device built into the software, the North Koreans are free to use this thing. Well, what do we do when Putin gives a weapon of this destructive magnitude and capability to a crazy person? We ignore it. This was raised six months ago. First on this program, actually. And Jacob Sullivan was asked about it three days later.

And he said, oh, yeah, we're aware that we're having our intelligence people look at it. Nothing since then. There have been attempts to deride this analysis of Ted Postol and others who know what ends up on this stuff. But there's no addressing this. It's too embarrassing. You know, the Russians would do this. You know, you would think they would try to blacken the Russians by doing this. But it's really kind of interesting that they shy away from saying, look, this is what we have lost. The Russians are so angry and so eager to have a manifold retaliatory capability

that even the North Koreans now are in receipt of, well, the next most sophisticated ICBM that the Russians produce. Back to the threat assessment before we finish. Does it tell the president how many troops from foreign countries are on the ground in Ukraine? How many French, how many Germans, how many Poles? You know, I don't think it does, but the Ministry of Defense in Moscow just three days ago said there were, if I remember this, 36,000 foreign volunteers, foreign mercenaries in Ukraine, 6,000 of whom have been killed.

That, I think, is what the Ministry of Defense said. I may be wrong on the threat assessment, but I don't recall it being included in the threat assessment. Ray, thank you for your time. I have to run off to my other gig with my Newsmax friends. I will look forward to seeing you on Friday with Larry. Thanks. Okay. All the best, my friend.

Thank you. So coming up, Anya, you all know who that is, at three o'clock, Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom. Thank you.