Judging Freedom - Ray McGovern: Putin, Trump, and Ukraine

Episode Date: November 11, 2024

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Thank you. Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Monday, November 11th, 2024. Ray McGovern will be with us in just a moment on Trump, Putin and Ukraine. What's next? But first, this. We're taught to work hard for 35 to 40 years. Save your money, then live off your savings. Unfortunately, there are too many threats undermining the value of our hard earned dollars. The Fed's massive money printing machine is shrinking your dollars value.

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Call my friends at Lear Capital, the leader in precious metals, investing for over 27 years. They help me diversify into gold and silver. They can help you too. Go Lear today at 800-511-4620, 800-511-4620, or go to learjudgenap.com. Ah, there you are. Welcome here, Ray McGovern. What do you think is the Kremlin's view? They haven't really stated it other than some public niceties, but what do you think the Kremlin's real view is of Trump's election? Well, Judge, it's Veterans Day, Armistice Day. A lot of my comrades from Fort Benning didn't come back from Vietnam.

Let's start with just two or three lines from that famous In Flanders Fields poem. In Flanders Fields, the poppies blow between the crosses row on row that mark our place. And in the sky, the larks still bravely fly, singing, scarce heard among the guns below. Judge, as you remember, that was the war to end all wars. Right. Where we are today, thinking about trying to end two wars, one in Ukraine and one in West Asia. I would just say one more thing, and that is that today is also the 20th anniversary

of the assassination, and I repeat, the assassination of Yassir Arafat, Swiss physicians who looked into how he was poisoned, identified a slow-moving or slow-acting polonium. He was killed by the Israeli Mossad. So 20 years ago, we had some hope of a breakthrough. I know more, so things are looking pretty bleak. I'm sorry to start out on this note, but it's a sorrowful occasion. I know this comes from your heart. You needn't apologize for it. But to the latest news, I mean, what do you think the Kremlin truly thinks about Trump's election? And I'll broaden the question. Does U.S. intelligence know what

the Kremlin thinks about Trump's election? The answer to the latter, I'm 90% sure, is no. My own view is, for what it's worth, over 50 years of watching Soviet leaders. Well, I don't have to analyze really. Putin said at Valdai on Thursday or Friday, depending on which time zone you're in, that he doesn't know what Trump's going to do. Before, lots of Russian officials have said, you know, he's unpredictable.

And that's the one thing we look for in an American president, is predictability. On the other hand, he's willing to talk. There is some indication that he's willing to listen, even. And if his proposals on Ukraine make any sense, well, that's a very different kettle of, they don't say kettle of fish, but it's a very different attitude than we have encountered on the Biden-Harris administration. So they don't know, but they're open. Putin makes the point that he's open to talks. It's just that no more of this American exceptionalism or

indispensability. The lay of the land has changed, and his speech at Valdai, which we can get into later, makes that very, very simple. Look, the world has changed. We're riding high. We have Valdai and the majority of the world's population behind us. This time, you really have to listen to us and not go back to what you think you can do because you are indispensable or exceptional. One of the reasons they have the majority of the world's population behind them is because of the United States believing it's indispensable and manifesting that indispensability by, I'm going to use Trump's phrase, the forever wars. Well, that's true. You know, we had the upper hand, you know, we had it since World War II. Then we had it when the Soviet Union imploded, okay? And then the attitude was, well, the Russians can't hurt us. They can't stop

us. That was explicitly what General Wesley Clark was told by Paul Wilfowitz after the first Gulf War, January, February 1991. Look, the big lesson we learned from the first Gulf War is the Russians can't stop us, okay? Now, now the Russians stopped us. Where did they stop us first? In Syria, all right? When Putin signed a letter to Obama in 2015, he said, look, we're not going to let you overthrow Bashar al-Assad's government. We're sending aircraft.

We're sending all kinds of troops there. We'd like to do this peacefully. And indeed, they worked out an agreement, a ceasefire agreement in Syria, which was within six days violated by the U.S. Air Force. So anyhow, what I'm saying here is that there was a modicum of trust. Let me go back just 11 years. I was writing about this yesterday. 11 years ago, when there was an attack outside Damascus with nerve gas. OK, that was a red line set a year before by Hillary Clinton. OK, once there's a siren, once there's a chemical attack by the Syrians, it turned out to be a false flag, folks, but hear me out. That was the tripwire and all. Obama admits all of his advisors said, now you have to do an overt war. You have to send those tomahawks into Syria.

You got to do it, okay? Now, coincidentally or providentially, he was on his way up to St. Petersburg for some kind of G7, G8 summit, G8 in those days. And Putin took him aside and said, look, you know, you don't have to go to war. We have persuaded the Syrians to destroy their chemical weapons under the UN supervision on a ship. If you'll provide the ship, you have two of them, a ship specifically outrigged to destroy chemical weapons. What do you think? And Obama said, thanks for, in effect, thanks for pulling my chestnuts out of the fire. I'll go back and tell John Kerry and the rest of them, no war. Now, at that time, that was early September 2013. At that time, the New York Times ran an op-ed

by Vladimir Putin. And what he said in there is, look, I am really delighted at the growing trust, not only between our two countries, but between myself and President Obama. The only thing I don't agree with, says Putin in this last paragraph,

is that there are exceptional countries in the world. This is what the president, President Obama, said just last week in a big speech. I don't believe there are any exceptional countries in the world. There are good ones, there are people close to democracy, some farther away from democracy, but when God looks at all the nations of the world, he considers them all equal. Okay. End quote. Well, that's what he was trying to sell Obama at the time.

Right. Well, kind of listened, but then he listened to the Victoria Nulands of this world. And six months later, boom, from the apogée to the perigée, the relationship between the two countries went down when Nuland and her crowd staged a coup in Kiev and put in a bunch of folks that they could manage and they could persuade to join NATO. Trump's people claim that he and Putin have spoken. They claim that Trump told him not to accelerate the war. According to Larry Johnson, the war has been substantially accelerated in the past 48 hours. And according to Dmitry Peskov, Trump and Putin have not spoken. What do you think? This is a real sad story for me personally, because I had a wonderful article all set to run at noon today on Consortium News on the premise that what the Washington Post was saying from several well-plugged in sources was true. That is, that there was a conversation between Trump and Putin on Thursday. There wasn't any.

There wasn't any conversation. This is all pravda on the Potomac, so to speak. This is crazy. This shows the level to which the Western press, even some mildly respected country periodicals or newspapers, have fallen. So yeah, this wonderful article I had comparing things now to earlier on has fallen through the cracks because, oh my God, I should have known better. I trusted the Washington Post. This also shows how your former employer and colleagues want us to think, because we know if it came out of the Washington Post, who planted it there, right? That's right.

And the headline said that Trump warned the Russians not to escalate in Ukraine. Maybe. I don't know. They play games all the time. This is smoke and mirrors. And I fell for it because, you know, it made sense in a certain sense. But then when I compared what they were saying happened on Thursday and what Putin was saying the same day and early Friday in Valdez, I said, wow, well, we'll go with that anyway, because this is the first time two American presidents or presidents elects or former presidents have talked in two and a half years. That's news. I'll lead with that.

And I was, of course, taken in by the Washington Post. I should have known better. Right, right, right. I'm sort of surprised, Ray, at your answer that you don't think American intel is aware of Putin's thinking. Maybe I'm giving them more credit than they deserve. If Mossad and FSB know what's going on in the White House, doesn't CIA know what's going on in the Kremlin? Judge, I'm sorry to break this news to you, but we've had precious few spies with that kind of access when i joined the the cia we had a

really good spy his name was penkovsky he was very high military folks he was wrapped up there were a couple of this since but it was a it was a fable it was a a tall story that john Brennan spun during Russiagate, that he had a real wonderful Kremlin source. Now, that source ended up on a nice house in New Jersey. No one ever bothered him. No one asked, were you really the source? In other words, you know, we don't have good insight into what the Kremlin is thinking. How about electronic spying?

Well, you know, the state of the art is not only really good for aggressive monitoring, but for defensive prevention. So it could be we have very sophisticated things get through. But usually Russian security is so good that usually they're careful enough to prevent this. You know who agrees with you there is Ritter. Scott says that the Russians have the best defensive digital mechanisms in the world, even better than the Israelis. Do you think that American intel is aware of how European elites, the EU and NATO, have privately reacted to Trump's election. Do you have any finger on those pulses? Well, I know that the German government is about to collapse. That has several reasons. But Biden and Harris are first and foremost among those reasons.

You know, it's not necessary to have special spies in these countries. We have such close relations that even the embassies are very good at reporting reactions if they they report candidly and objectively. The question is, you know, is somebody telling Biden, look, Joe, my God, when you let Bill Burns tell his people to blow up the Nord Stream pipeline, my God, the economy in Germany and the rest of Russia and the rest of Europe is going down like this, you know. And now we ought to kind of fess up, but we ought to try to help them instead of dunning them for more help for Ukraine.

The fact that we're not giving anymore or your successor is not going to give much more. You know, it's a sorry story. Figure out a way to make it less bad, Joe. Are they going to tell them that? I don't think so. the new German government, or do you think the German people recognize that the reason they're burning dirty coal this winter, this coming winter, and did last winter, is because of Joe Biden? No, and that's a sad story. Nobody will admit, except for Cy Hirsch and a few of us, what truly happened to the Red Stream pipeline?

Very few Germans know about it. Cy used to have contacts where when the New York Review of Books or the London Review of Books wouldn't publish him anymore, he published in German periodicals. He had friends there, and they translated immediately from English into German and vice versa. So when that all petered out, Cy can't get published, the premier investigative reporter of our era, okay? And he wrings his hands. I remember him talking to Bob Perry, my mentor in journalism, and they're both wringing their hands. I remember him talking to Bob Perry, my mentor in journalism, and they're both ringing the head up, what the hell has happened to our profession, and why can't anyone let us into the major media? It's just a very sad story, and as a result, in answer to your question, the European

populace knows very little, and my friends in Germany tell me that sadly, there are only about 30% of people that have any idea that it was the United States, specifically the CIA, that blew up those Nord Stream pipelines. I don't have a good handle on German politics, but would any of Chancellor Scholl's opposition, when they have their election in the spring, be running on the platform. You let Biden do this. The reason we have lousy heating and a breathing foul air is because of you. Or doesn't it work that way? Well, so far, the best example of the new look in German politics is a woman who broke off from Die Linke, the left party that forgot its roots and started to be the middle party, okay? Her name is Sarah Wagenknecht. Oh, yeah. And she's gotten 12, 13, 14% of the vote in some of those formerly East German provinces.

Now, she and the AfD, the Alternative für Deutschland, the rather right-wing party, they have a majority in some of those provinces. But, you know, they don't see eye to eye on a lot of things, on immigration and stuff like that. So it's a real duel between the old Christian Democrats and the social Democrats that used to rule the roost in Germany and these new parties. One of them looked on as very dangerous, the AfD, and Sarah Wagenknecht, who is really looking on the truth here, her deputy, a woman named Sevim Dagladen, she said this about what you need to know about politics in Germany and internationally. studi ist sich bei diesem Königreich von Lügen

nicht dumm machen zu lassen. Which means a first studi by this Königreich, this kingdom of Lügen, of lies, ist nicht dumm machen zu lassen. Don't let ourselves

be made dumb. Okay? Now she got really good resonance among 15, 20 percent of the German people. They're working their way up. They used to be three percent, so that's the hope. They're going to have to be in some kind of coalition with somebody else, hopefully not the AfD, which is really, really. Let's get back to Ukraine. Trump boasted several times during the campaign he could end the war in 24 hours. How could he possibly do that? Well, he can't.

And, you know, Putin, tongue in cheek, said, you know, I'd really be interested. I wonder how he plans to do that. Well, he's not going to do it in 24 hours. But he may do it just as he comes into office. It all depends on whether he listens this time to what Putin was saying just recently in Valdai. Look, the time is to listen to the reality. We can proceed from earlier agreements, but we have to recognize the lay of the land on the ground. We're not going to give up our military advances. We're going to deal, but only if you recognize that we have,

we have core interests here and that we're willing to deal, but on the basis of new realities that have taken place over the last 20 years. Last subject matter, you and Larry and the others who've spent your careers or part of your careers in the intelligence community have educated me that the raw intelligence on the ground in the field from electronics is not always what makes its way to the Oval Office. What makes its way to the Oval Office is what the people speaking to the president thinks he wants to hear, think he wants to hear. How easily can the intelligence community pivot from telling Joe Biden what he wants to hear to telling Donald Trump what they think he wants to hear? It all depends on people, Judge. It all depends on who Trump selects to be the head of the CIA and that post above the CIA, the National Director for Intelligence, who is now that woman named Haynes, Averill Haynes, if he picks good people and they are courageous enough to bang some heads,

it'll take them a while. It may take them all of four years, but they could get honest intelligence from folks, witness the fact that this precise thing was done in 2007 on the question of whether Iran was working on a nuclear weapon. An honest person came in, ran a national intelligence estimate and said, no, they're not. And the result was no attack on Iran during that last year before Bush and Cheney rode off into the western sunset. So the gatherers of intel will be the same professionals

and the reporters of it will be political hacks. Well, the gatherers, you know, just report what they can gather. Okay, now the electronic stuff can be very good. The satellite stuff is the best there is, okay? Now, how that's interpreted makes all the difference. If you go back to Iraq, weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, Scott Ritter knew there weren't any. No one would listen to him. Now, what happened? The The imagery analysis had been seeded from the CIA to the Pentagon, okay, to the Pentagon. And who was appointed to supervise the analysis of information on weapons of mass destruction? A fellow named General James Clapper.

And what does Clapper admit in his memoir? He says, well, Dick Cheney and others were leaning so hard on us to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq that we came up with 171 suspect places. But I have to admit, says Clapper, that I, was guilty of actually finding things that weren't really there. A direct quote from this book, okay? We found things that weren't really there. Oh, isn't that great? When you have the Pentagon running the imagery analysis, you can find things that aren't really there if you want to make a war.

Well, we both remember how he lied under oath and on national television, the same James Clapper. So none of this is surprising. When Senator Ron Wyden asked him if the government was spying on tens or even hundreds of millions of people, he answered no. Now, Wyden knew he had lied because he had answered yes when Wyden asked him the same question in the SCIF, in the secure facility, the contents of which can't be revealed. That's the way the government operated then. I suspect that's the way it'll continue to operate. Ray, a pleasure, my dear friend. Look forward to seeing you with Larry at the end of the week.

Thanks, Judge. Sure. All the week. Thanks, Josh. Sure. All the best. And the aforementioned Larry is Larry Johnson coming up at 11 o'clock this morning. At four this afternoon, Scott Ritter. And at five this afternoon or evening, Professor Jeffrey Sachs. Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom. I'm Adam.