Judging Freedom - Ray McGovern: Zelenskyy's Endgame

Episode Date: March 10, 2025

Ray McGovern: Zelenskyy's EndgameSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

you Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Monday, March 10th, 2025. Still coming to you live from Moscow, my dear friend and our regular Monday morning Eastern time guest and colleague Ray McGovern joins us now. Ray, it's a pleasure. Thank you very much for joining us. I wish that you had been with me and not only for your companionship and your intellect, but for your language skills in the past 5 days that I've been here. I did just finish, as you and I were talking during the break, Larry Johnson finished this as well, a two-hour debriefing with Prime Minister Sergei Lavrov. I would say 98% of it in English. There were times when he periodically turned to one of his aides seated at the table with him and whispered or mumbled something in Russian, an official transcript and an official video

of the interview will be posted tomorrow, Russian time, Moscow time, on the official website of the Foreign Ministry, but we are certainly free to discuss impressions gleaned from the time with him. He came up to me afterwards and said, next time you come to Moscow, you come to see me first, not last, because he's been here for five days. And he said he enjoys watching the program. He mentioned our friend Jeff Sachs. So it's a startling thrill for me

to hear from the dean of world diplomats that he watches our podcast. And of course, you're a major part of the podcast. You're on twice a week with Larry. This is very good news, Judge. I'm not surprised that Lavrov has a sense of humor. Think of Tony Blinken trying to tell a little story like that. You know, you need a sense of humor to do this work. And that's why Lavrov has been around so long and does this work so well. Uh, so it's quite a compliment that, uh, that he started out that way.

And then he said, he watches you, you know, we're really good at Rube, Rubio, watch your show too. Maybe we could ask love it off to ask Rubio to watch your show. What do you think? Well, that would be, Well, that would be terrific. We know from little snippets of information that have gotten back to us that somebody in the Trump administration, I don't know if it's the White House, the West Wing, the State Department, somewhere somebody watches the show. We know that and it's gratifying and hopefully some of our ideas can make their way into the president's head and into the president's policy.

The Russians are, I wouldn't say ecstatic, but I would say optimistic and hopeful at the grand reset. And they know and want the same thing Donald Trump does, which is not just an end to the war in Ukraine, but a grand reset of the relationship between the United States, Russia, China, India, and Brazil. There's more hope now in that direction, Judge, in decades. I have to add here that I take great solace in the notion that our administration apparently is reading veteran intelligence professionals for sanity output. We did five memos for Biden. He ignored them all, But there's ample evidence that Tulsi Gabbard and Ratcliffe are in possession of them and actually maybe even being guided by them, as well as by people

like Professor Jeffrey Sachs. And that's, that's such good news. Just think, Judge, four months ago, you and I, Scott Ritter and others were deathly afraid It will end up in a nuclear war because of what had happened now. I think we can breathe a lot easier I just wish those young people in Ukraine would stop killing each other But I think that's coming soon Part of this is from Alistair Crook Ray, and I suspect you agree, but this is really your field, so feel free to speak candidly on it. Alistair's view is that Trump recognizes

the British security state, MI6, unbridled spying on British citizens and on Americans when they're there. Prosecutions in British courts for free speech is all part of the big state, all part of the deep state that he is determined to dismantle. Do you accept that analogy? I do, Judge, and not only that. Trump knows that it was the British that started Russiagate at the behest of John Vernon, for God's sake. And let's recall that on the 20th of February, during that brouhaha in the Oval Office, Trump went so far as to identify Puccine with the ill treatment Trump himself received

at the hands of these people that are really Russophobes. So what does that mean? Well, that means that there's ample reason for change here. And more important, Trump is not afraid of identifying himself with Putin. And if people call him as saying he's in Putin's pocket, well, that's no longer a viable charge if he can bring peace, at least in Ukraine, on Gaza. It's a completely different story. One of the things that Foreign Minister Lavrov was particularly critical of was President Macron suggesting this peacekeeping force.

He looked right at me and he said, you know, it would be more force than peace. I said, you're right. Of course he's right. He understands these things. So for Americans to say, even members of the United States Senate on the Republican side, to say we need a peacekeeping force is insane. That is a non-starter with the Russians. That's clear. That's not going to happen. And they have taken Russian top officials now. They didn't use to do this they've been very caustic. And referring to macron advisedly as a pretend napoleon okay.

Reminding him don't you don't you remember what happened when napoleon was around how we chased them out of Europe, for God's sake. So, you know, Judge, you sort of interject here that we also serve who stay behind, right? Today we are expecting a big announcement. It has to do with Russiagate and Parekh Salon. how it got started real time how it got a big push and that is the so called Russian hacking of the Democratic National Committee emails that were so prejudicial to Now I'm obviously not up on American domestic affairs in the five days in here, but who, from whom do you expect a big announcement? The Department of Justice? Yes.

The Department of Justice and the FBI have to decide whether they'll allow the FBI knuckle draggers to foot drag any longer after five, six, seven years of denying, number one, that they had any records on Seth Rich. And number two, oh, we had so many records we can't possibly make them available. The judge, the federal judge in this case, has put today as the deadline for the FBI to comply finally with the demand to release documents and other computer stuff of Vaughn index is what it's called of what's in Seth Rich's laptops, personal and workplace. So now this will be a litmus test.

And again, this is inside baseball, but Cash Patel, he knows what happened to the Epstein incident. He knows that the chief of the field office in New York deliberately, deliberately opposed and did not give those documents to attorney general Bondi. What's going gonna happen today? Is Cash Patel gonna acquiesce in more foot dragging? It's smart when he says he will, but I don't know. Do me a favor and email me or text me before you... Yeah, we'll have the announcement today. And meanwhile, Consortium knows has a great piece by Bob Bob Perry by Joe Loria and I put out a piece that I wrote back in well five years ago

with necessary background because it's been off the public consciousness deliberately because the the med the media together with the deep state that is call me and Brennan and And see what else deep state that is Comey and Brennan and and see what else deep state media and of course the Democratic National Committee has succeeded in suppressing court testimony showing that there is no evidence that the Russians hacked those DNC emails. I want to talk to you a little bit about Intel in Ukraine. It is not clear to me that the president has succeeded in turning off all U.S. Intel as it provides information and data to the Ukrainians. Al Steyer reminds us, Scott Ritter told us this last week and so did Colonel

McGregor, that US Intel is absolutely vital for locating Russian troop movements and Russian military gear because the British do not have the satellites or access to the satellites that US Intel has. So my question to you is, is it a complete shutdown or are they still providing, is US Intel still providing information either directly to Ukraine or circuitously through MI6, their British cousins? It's, it's shut down, their British cousins. It's shut down, Judge. The British and the French can bump their breasts, but they ain't got the goods. They have no capability.

The big story here, of course, is that when Trump talked to Putin, it is obvious that Putin said, did you know that you are enabling direct attacks on Russia proper? Did you know that Mr. President, did you know that the Ukrainians couldn't do this crazy thing without you?

Now knock it off, would you please? And it was knocked off. It took a while, a couple of weeks, they knocked off the delivery of arms aid, and now they've knocked off the intelligence. The sophisticated intelligence enabled not only the firing of sophisticated missiles, but battleground intelligence as to where Russian units were. That's over.

And just over the last two days, Kursk, where the Ukrainians made their crazy thing into Kursk, Russia proper, they're all all surrounded now the ones that are still alive maybe eight nine thousand of them there in a cauldron. It's just so sad will they finally give up a late fight to the last Ukrainian as has been the model for US encouragement to the Ukrainian authorities. Larry says that some of the people in there are not Ukrainian soldiers, they are foreign mercenaries and they're being executed. They're either not wearing uniforms or they're wearing uniforms of the countries to which they don't belong and the Russians are executing them. And it is sad that these people were duped and tricked into thinking this would be a

military operation that would turn the tide of the war. Now it turns out to have been an unmitigated disaster. The loss in Kyrsk alone is 70,000 lives on the Ukrainian side. I can't say they're all Ukrainians because there are foreigners there. But that is a little under 10% of the total loss, which is now over 700,000 on the Ukrainian side since the war began two years ago.

Yeah, Judge, we know that the West, that is the US and the UK, were involved in the planning. Were involved all the way through of this Kursk episode. It was a, you know, the big adventure of UK and the US to let this happen. That's crazy. That shows that our military and our intelligence services are completely incompetent. If they told President Biden, yeah, tell Zelensky to do this, maybe then Congress will think, oh, they still have some fight left in them and provide more aid, which of course happens. So cynical.

People are dying by the hundreds every day here, thousands some people say, and it's coming to a head because the best troops that the Ukrainians had, what did they do? They took them off the front line in Donbas and they put them into course. Now they've lost so many and now they're surrounded and now they have nothing to prevent the Russians from moving forward in a measured way toward the Dnieper River and as far as more as they decide they want to do to create a cordon sonneterre between Russian hell territory and western hell territory from which the west will not be able to reach Russian Herald territory with their sophisticated weapons.

Lavrov said this two years ago. He said, look, it's a matter of geography. We're going to move ahead as far as minutes what you think Zelensky's end game will be, but while we're still talking about the American provision and now cutting off, and you've clarified that it's totally cut off, of Intel, I want to play a little clip. This will get under your skin. It got deeply under Larry's skin from the president's golfing buddy, one of the least credible people in the United States Senate. So Chris, let's do then and now, number nine,

and then number eight. So then and now and then yesterday, nine and eight. I wanna tell you and your people, you're the ally I've been hoping for all my life. Not one American has died defending Ukraine. You've taken our weapons and you've kicked their ass. And I'm very proud to have you as our ally. So would I think complete utter disaster. What I saw in the Oval Office was disrespectful. And I don't know if we can ever do business with Zelensky again. He either needs to resign and send somebody over

that we can do business with or he needs to change. But you're not helping anybody during these discussions if you do not provide the weapons necessary for Ukraine to defend themselves. You're not helping end the war if you deny intelligence to Ukraine to defend themselves while the fighting is going on. Well, I don't know what he's thinking or who he talks to, but the president has said no more military equipment. Alistair says it'll take a while for that to have an effect because of what's stockpiled in Ukraine and in Romania.

And you've clarified that the intel has been cut off. So Ray McGovern, this is an easy one, Ray. Does Lindsey Graham know what the hell he's talking about? Judge, people talk about giving hypocrisy a bad name, cynicism a bad name. You get political hacks like that, gentlemen, and I used the word charitably. And you, you've got real problems in Congress and it looks like Trump will have the ability to bring people like Lindsey Graham, uh, under, under, within rain of your rain them in so that they can't put the kibosh on what he's trying to do is moving so fast what did i say i say that the is a rubio meeting with the ucranians today for god's sake wow i believe that secretary of state Rubio is in Kiev today meeting with his opposite number, a human being whose name I don't know, but with whom the Secretary has yet to meet in his job as Secretary.

Yeah, and you know, this is going so fast, Judge, that even you and I have in trouble keeping up, but it's very enlightening as to how Trump moves. He's shattered all the images and he's made new news every day and if this thing goes ahead and the Russians seem quite willing to play ball here, so long as their deep objectives are observed, namely this distance that I mentioned, the cordon sanitaire, but also to address their legitimate security concerns that everyone recognizes. The Chinese, the Iranian, everyone recognizes Russia is entitled not to have NATO in Ukraine. Now that's a done deal.

Even Trump has acknowledged that's not going to happen. Does Intel have data which can inform John Ratcliffe, Tulsi Gabbard and eventually the president on the likely end game for President Zelensky himself? endgame for President Zelensky himself. No, and that is because Zelensky doesn't have that daddy either. He's playing it day to day, judge. You know, I'm sure he's got a secure place, some mansion somewhere to go to, just like that fellow in Afghanistan did,

piling money on the plane and dropping some on the tarmac. But I don't know what Zelensky he's gonna do. He's got a choice He's got to play ball with with what's happening now with Russia and the US pressuring him or he's going to defer to his neo-nazi advisors and And act like the actor that he is and still play the role of saving Ukraine. I don't know which way it's going to go, but I'm hopeful that within the next month or so we'll know what the outcome is likely to be. Just reported now, literally a minute ago by the BBC, United States Secretary of State

Marco Rubio and Elon Musk have clashed with Poland's foreign minister over the use of the tech billionaire's Starlink satellite internet system in Ukraine. Musk said on X that Ukraine's entire front line would collapse if he turned the system off. Radoslaw Sikorski, the foreign minister, responded saying his country paid for its use in Ukraine and the threat to shut it down would result in a search for another network. Rubio dismissed Minister Sikorski's claims and told him to be grateful while Musk, typical

for Musk, called him a small man. What's your take on this, Ray McGovern? Well, the worst thing, judges, that Sikorski is not going to want to be called a small man. He's poisoned. Before he was even foreign minister, but a high dignitary in Poland. On the day that the Nord Stream pipelines were sabotaged, he sent a message and said, way to go USA, USA, USA. And he included a photo of the big bubble that was there in where the sabotage happened.

So he's foreign minister, yeah, but he's not long for this world in my view. If he continues to impede this kind of thing and can it continues to believe and act like the British and the fresher acting like I'm still a big shot. of Poland, these guys have had it. And we're going to have to see how the Europeans deal with this once they wake up and say, whoa, we can't act like this for many weeks more because we ain't got the goods to protect Ukraine. We've got to see what the new realities are and trim our sails accordingly. Ray McGovern, thank you very much, my dear friend. Thank you for joining us today. Thank you for coming at a different hour. Thank you for accommodating my schedule while I'm here in Moscow. Much appreciated. Most welcome, Judge, and good luck for your rest of your stay. Thank you. Thank you. We will be back with you with a full schedule, a long and full schedule on Wednesday and Thursday of this week and the roundtable at the end of the day Friday. Trav's in the Palo Taro for Judging Freedom. You