Judging Freedom - Ray McGovern: Trump, the CIA, and USAID

Episode Date: February 17, 2025

Ray McGovern: Trump, the CIA, and USAIDSee 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 Monday, February 17th, 2025. Ray McGovern is here on what is the connection between the Central Intelligence Agency and USAID? And is Trump aware of this? But first this. Markets are at an all-time high. Euphoria has set in. The economy seems unstoppable. But the last administration has buried us so deep in debt and deficits, it's going to take a lot of digging to get us out of this hole. Are you prepared? Lear Capital specializes in helping people like me and you grow and protect our wealth with gold.

Did you know that during Trump's last presidency, gold rose 54% to a record high. If that happens again, that puts gold at $4,200 an ounce in his next term. Don't wait. Do what I did. Call Lear at 800-511-4620 or go to learjudgenap.com for your free gold ownership kit and special report, $4,200 gold ahead. When you call, ask how you can also get up to $15,000 in bonus gold with a qualifying purchase. Call 800-511-4620, 800-511-4620, or go to learjudgenap.com and tell them the judge sent you. Ray McGovern, welcome here, my dear friend. Does the Central Intelligence Agency have a slush fund that lets them spend money wherever, whenever, however they want? Of course. It's not accountable to anyone. The so-called committees that are supervising, so to speak, the CIA, they're called the oversight communities.

And I often say, well, oversight has two meanings. So theirs is a oversight like that, where it's supposed to be oversight like this. It's been a long time since the church committee set up those committees, the church committee that looked into CIA abuses, and it's eroded over time. The principal people and the people at the CIA briefs are part and parcel, they're hand in glove with the CIA, and they can't by any stretch reveal secrets. One little example here, Dick Durbin. Now, before Iraq, when the evidence... You're talking about the senator from Illinois? Correct, yeah. Before Iraq, he was briefed on what the intelligence said. And he came out of the room and the reporter said, well, what'd you hear? He said, oh, well, my God, I can't tell you. I would get in trouble. It's classified. Now, what he heard, of course,

was a bunch of baloney. And he's smart enough to know that. That same, well, later during Russiagate, he appears with this democratic think tank, and I asked him, one of the first, last times I got a chance to ask a question, well, don't you think that you ought to look into whether or not the Russians hacked or not? I mean, hello, there's no evidence. And he says, are you against the investigation? No, it is not my point. So all these people are kind of, they're suborned or they're under the control of these fellows that actually Poochie described at one point, the men with the briefcases and dark glasses and the suits, Poochie says, suits just like mine, dark suits. And they tell the president and they tell the Congress what's up and what to do.

So bankers have a phrase called regulatory capture, meaning that they have actually captured and they end up regulating the regulators that are supposed to regulate them. I gather the same is the case with the CIA. If they give a briefing to the Senate Intelligence Committee and the House Intelligence Committee, and they do it in a skiff, a secret place, and the members of the committee can't have mobile devices and they can't make notes and they can't repeat what they hear, although we know they can repeat what they hear, I'll give an instance in a minute. They're not really regulating, are they? Of course they're not. And you know, when the CIA limits it to the big six, I think it is, the Senate and House leadership, well, that's even more restricted, where all of them are sort of like they have a sworn duty, they think,

to keep these secrets and let these things go forward. They know that they can go to the floor of the House and the floor of the Senate and say anything they want. Now, they may not be invited to another briefing, but they can't, quote, get in trouble. They can't be prosecuted, they can't be sued, they can't be the subject of an ethics inquiry or investigation or prosecution because of the speech or debate clause in the Constitution. I'm reminded of Senator Dianne Feinstein. He took the 6,000-page report on torture and deposited it in the hopper in the Senate, which made it public, even though, of course, she had been warned and threatened not to do so. Whatever you think of her, not a hair on her head was harmed as a result of that. It was just an executive summary, Judge, and it was highly vetted in a lot of

. In other words, the whole report has never been released, and that's important to remember because as damaging as that very lengthy executive summary was, even Dianne Feinstein was not able to ensure before she was replaced by Burr of North Carolina, she was not able to ensure that the whole thing be released, even though it was completely vetted and prepared for release. So there are limits to what these people can do. And there are very, very few exceptions here diane feinstein as you appropriately point out was an exception but it was only with respect to the executive summary most most people don't use that prerogative i'll give an example here james mcdermott from state of washington he told me he would never never want to go to one of these classified briefings because then he would feel that he would be liable for prosecution or they go after him for revealing secrets which are

easily obtainable if you plug into the right websites. Wow. Is USAID a front for the CIA or a tool of the CIA? It's a conduit. Back when I was in active duty, so to speak, Bill Casey was so obvious about covert action that it became a little embarrassing. You know, mining harbors in Nicaragua, doing all kinds of things like that. And so they decided, hey, there's a better way to do this. Let's create the National Endowment for Democracy. That really sounds pretty good. Yeah. And we'll move all the CIA covert action stuff. We'll move all those guys to this NED, and then we can do all kinds of things like overthrow governments in Ukraine, which is what they did.

Now, how are you going to fund that? That's where USAID comes in. There's not enough funds, even in the CIA budget, to put $5 billion, which is what Nuland acknowledged was given to Ukraine's aspirations to join the West, in her words. So USAID is that conduit. They really don't have much to say about it, but I think their boss has been a willing accomplice in all this, and I'm glad she's gone. Now, what you have just described, is that known to MI6, to Mossad, to Russian intelligence? Sure. Yeah, they all know that. That's why they feel so, you know, they feel so willing to help.

In other words, if, as the British did, they were asked to play a role in a Russiagate, and they played one hell of a role, and they're reasonably confident that they'll never be called out on it. No, I never thought that Trump would win again. No. Johnson and I called out GCHQ spying on Trump. I mean, all hell broke loose for a couple of weeks until a few GCHQ agents went to the Guardian of London and said the judge in New York is correct. Yeah, yeah. So hand in glove, the Five Eyes, even other services like the Israelis,

they know exactly what's up. And they know the impunity that they are able to avail themselves of by playing these games. Now, this game may be over. I mean, if Kash Patel receives full confirmation this week, well, he knows where all these bodies are buried. He can help Trump clean this place out. And that's why they came out so strongly against him. And as I say, my advice is for Cash and for Tulsi Gabbard to have lunch that first day as soon as he's confirmed, have tasters to make sure that the lunch is okay, and figure out how they're going to take on the rest of the deep state because it's a formidable task.

Is CIA Director Ratcliffe firing CIA employees? Are they analysts or are they the operations people who like to blow up Nord Stream? I don't really know, Judge. You know, my colleagues at the CIA, well, I'll quote my 97-year-old grandmother who used to complain about her friends. They're all dead now as if it was their own fault. Well, many of my contemporaries are all dead now, and I have very few contacts. All I see is what's in the press. It makes great sense that there'd be a, well, I don't want to say purge, but there'd be a removal of all these windsocks that said, oh, yeah, Poutine is devil incarnate.

And now if Ratcliffe said, do you really think he's the devil incarnate? They'll say, well, no, I don't think that anymore. You're fired. Get out of here. In other words, they need real experts. That's the challenge. Where are they going to get them? Because the colleges, the university, the graduate schools have all trained these Russia experts into something less than objective observers. Right, right. I just wonder about Radcliffe. I think he's old

school and is going to be butting heads with his boss, Tulsi Gabbard. what do you think? I think that if Trump makes it clear, as Jimmy Carter did when Admiral Stansfield Turner came in as the equivalent of DNI, if Trump makes it clear that he's going to look to Tulsi Gabbard to exercise her full prerogatives as DNI, I think Ratcliffe will just obey that. And there's no indication to me that Ratcliffe will be anything other than totally loyal to Trump. As a matter of fact, it was Ratcliffe way back when the testimony of the head of CrowdStrike showed that there was no hacking of the DNC emails, whether by Russia or by anybody else. It was he that forced that acknowledgement, that public testimony, December 7th, no, December 5th, 2017, mind you. He forced it out into the open on May 7th, 2020. Now, the way they released it, of course, was with 50 nondescript, unimportant other documents. And so the mainstream media

could pretend on the 7th of May, 2020, that it didn't exist. And so 90% of the American people believe that the Russians hacked into the DNC to defeat Hillary Clinton and Trump owes his win in 2016 to the Russians. Yeah, that is at least the theory that they perpetrated. Fortunately, it's been obliterated. Switching gears, do you think that Benjamin Netanyahu really wants the United States to own Gaza and its offshore natural gas reserves?

No, I think this big thing is a big, big trial balloon. It certainly has injected new life into the whole question. How this plays out depends on many factors. The Saudis are key. Are they going to waste a lot of money on this? Are the Egyptians going to bend to U.S. diktat? I don't know. Is Netanyahu going to go through with phase two and phase three of the ceasefire agreement?

I don't know that either my hunch is he's not and what will trump do i don't think he could do anything in other words as i've said before i think netanyahu is clever by half on these things than trump does trump run the risk of being painted as a genocide donald uh if netanyahu goes back to slaughtering innocents using U.S. weaponry and ammunition and cash? Well, that's a risk that you and I see, Judge. It depends on what the mainstream media says, and the mainstream media is totally pro-Zionist. So you and I will realize that Trump is just as bad, if not worse, than Joe Biden, but few other people will realize that. And the genocide, I do not blanch before the

word, the genocide will continue. And that's the purpose of it, is to exterminate what Palestinians still live there, and then blame it on the Arabs for not taking them in to Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, or other places. Pretty cynical. Let's transition over to Ukraine, Ray. Last week, Secretary of Defense Hegseth made a number of speeches. The takeaways from them, as I see it, are that U.S. troops will not be in Ukraine, that Ukraine will not be in NATO, and Ukraine will not return to its pre-2014 borders. Two days later, he walked all those statements back. Why do you suppose he did that? Walked them back?

I'm not aware that he walked those statements back. What I know is the chronology that I was doing in my head earlier this morning. On the 12th, Putin-Trump 90-minute talk. On the 13th, Hexeth in Brussels says the things you said. No Ukraine and NATO, okay? You have to recognize the new strategic realities, and so Ukraine is not going to get its land back. And if any Europeans try to do some sort of peacekeeping or introduce their troops there, you're on your own europeans because we're not going to invoke nobody's going to invoke article 5 for the nato treaty we're out of here

good luck now as you know they're meeting in paris today uh some of them seven countries that i know of oddly not the baltics but they're just trying to figure out what the hell they do now and peacekeeping units are pretty much out of the question without military support from the US, and that's not forthcoming. So that was on the 13th. Now on the 14th, we had Vance. Vance in Munich at the Security Council. We know it. We discussed that already. And then more important, Judge, on the next day, okay, this is February the 15th, so the day after Vance, you have Rubio and Lavrov talking. And this is pretty earth-shattering. This is sort of the culmination of that 12, 13, 14. This is the 15th.

At the initiative, this is the readout, at the initiative the American side, Lavrov, had the telephone conversation with Secretary of State Marco Rubio. They're going to open channel communications to address longstanding issues in American and Russian relations. Their goal is to remove unilateral barriers inherited from the previous administration. Those are sanctions, folks, sanctions. Okay, what else? Well, they're going to talk about international issues like Ukraine, but also like Palestine and the broader Middle East.

That's Iran, folks. OK, now expert level meetings are going to busy themselves with rectifying the injustices that we suffered from Obama, who was mentioned personally, OK, because of what he did, throwing out Russian diplomats, confiscating Russian Russian property in the United States to help to help Hillary win. And then when she lost, he kept doing it so obama is the fly in the ointment here they're going to rectify not only what biden did but what obama did and here we go the end of it there both of them that is a lavrov and rubio reaffirmed their readiness to restore respectful and constructive interstate dialogue. They agreed to main regular contacts, including discussions on preparation for a potential high-level Russian-American summit.

So this is the culmination of 12, 13, 14. This is the 15th. This was Saturday. And now we know that high-level U.S. negotiators are going to Saudi Arabia and very high-level Russian negotiators as well. Looks like a deal is going to be struck pretty soon. And the Europeans are left out in the cold. And, you know, they're just desserts.

The political hacks that have been running Europe and toadying to what they thought would be the case with Biden and his likely successor. Well, that's not in the cards. Trump is facing them down. They have nowhere to go. And following all of that yesterday, the 16th is General Kellogg. You tell me if you think he knows what he's talking about. Chris, cut number one. Can you assure this audience that Ukrainians will be at the table and Europeans will be at the table? Oh, well, you just changed the whole dynamic. The answer to that last question, just as you framed it, the answer is no.

The answer to the earlier part of that question is yes. Of course the Ukrainians are going to be at the table. So the Europeans who have provided as much or more support than the Americans, in this process, you don't think should be at the table directly. You think it should be two protagonists. I said I'm a school of realism. I think that's not going to happen. But our philosophy is not to continue this war to the death of every last Ukrainian. There's really two protagonists when you look at it.

And there's one hopefully to be an intermediary. OK, who are the protagonists and who's the intermediary? Well, I'm saying is we do it. Notice I'm being very diplomatic about it. The fact is, we're looking at you can have the Ukrainians, the Russian and clearly the Americans at the table talking. But we've got to have specifics to get to a point the russians never come to a table with president zielinski because they quite properly do not recognize him as having any legitimate authority in ukraine well that's right uh judge i uh you know i laughed Judge, I laughed because Kellogg, with all due respect to three-star generals, is a clown.

And Trump picked him to divert attention to what's really going on. He's selling cornflakes to the Europeans and to anybody else who will listen. He's inchoate here. I don't understand what he's saying. He says one thing and then he repeats these sound bites like, oh, you changed the dynamic. I'm trying to be diplomatic here. Well, it'd be nice if diplomatic went together with cogent, but he says nothing cogent there. And he's just there as a diversion,

in my view. I've never taken him seriously. He said some really weird things that got him in trouble, I think, with the Trump administration's trying to cultivate good relations with Russia. So, you know, he's a convenient guy to run these interviews and so forth and divert attention to what's really going on. And what's really going on is the most hopeful sign in U.S.-Russian relations since before Obama, when George W. Bush, for God's sake, said there's no threat from Russia or China. They're trying to build their economies. We wish them well. George W. Bush.

Wow. Graham McGovern, thank you very much, my dear friend. Always a pleasure. We'll look forward to seeing you with the youngster Larry Johnson on Friday. Thanks, George. Okay. All the best. And the aforementioned Larry Johnson will be here at 1130 this morning and at two

o'clock this afternoon, the always worth waiting for with some hot news, Scott Ritter. Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom. Thanks for watching!