Judging Freedom - Scott Ritter - Biden’s Mideast tour & Ukraine

Episode Date: July 21, 2022

#biden #ukraine #russia #putinSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This new year, why not let Audible expand your life by listening? Audible CA contains over 890,000 total titles within its current library, including audiobooks, podcasts, and exclusive Audible Originals that'll inspire and motivate you. Tap into your well-being with advice and insight from leading professionals and experts on better health, relationships, career, finance, investing, and more. Maybe you want to kick a bad habit or start a good one. If you're looking to encourage positive change in your life one day and challenge at a time, look no further than Tabitha Brown's I Did a New Thing, 30 Days to Living Free. In the audiobook, Tab shares her own stories and those of others alongside

gentle guidance and encouragement to create these incredible changes for yourself and see what good can come from them. Trust me, listening on Audible can help you reach the goals you set for yourself. Start listening today when you sign up for a free 30-day trial at audible.com slash wonderyca. That's audible.com slash wonderyca. That's audible.com slash wonderyca. Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Thursday, July 21st, 2022. It's about 105 in the afternoon. My guest today, you can see him on

the screen, needs no introduction to those of you who are regular viewers. Scott Ritter is one of the foremost explainers today of the use of military as an instrument of foreign policy and the use of intelligence data to inform the foreign policy makers. He joins us again. Scott, it's always a pleasure. Welcome back to Judging Freedom. Thank you very much for having me. So since we last spoke, which was about a month ago, tell us about the events that have taken place in the military conflict in Ukraine and who's winning, who's losing, and how this thing is going. Let me make it really quick. Is it over?

You know, the short answer to that one is yes, it's over. I mean, it's going to take some time for everybody to catch up to that conclusion but the the fact of the matter is this uh Russia is winning across the board militarily on the battlefield politically we just only have to take a look at the collapse of uh the rapid collapse of uh Europe's uh political order and the ongoing demise of the Biden administration here in America and then economically Russia has flipped the script uh the the sanctions have boomeranged on the US, Europe. Russia is doing quite well economically. When you look at those three things all together,

there is nothing that can happen to change the trajectory each one of these three different avenues are going in. Russia is winning, will continue to win on the battlefield. The European, you know, Johnson's out, Droege's out, and we just wait until they're all out. The G7 is history, is toast. Biden is going to be on for two more years, but the Democrats are out. I mean, come up with a scenario that shows me the Democrats hold on to the House and the Senate. And I mean, I'd like to know what you're smoking. But what have the Russians accomplished? What have they acquired?

Do they want to go farther, deeper into Ukraine or have they achieved their goals? Well, no, the goals have shifted. The Russians have basically said, and something I told you I mentioned previously the more we provide Ukraine with these weapons uh the greater the price will be that Ukraine and the West will pay uh and the Russians came out yesterday and said uh it's no longer about taking the Donbas uh we're taking all the territory we've already acquired is ours forever permanent we're never giving it back. That means Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Oblasts.

And we're going to keep going. We're going to take more. That means Odessa. Anybody who has any doubts about the future of Odessa, understand it will forever be part of the Russian Federation because the Russians aren't going to stop until they take it. They'll probably take Kharkov, the city of Kharkov. They may go on to Dnipropetrovsk. We don't know. The bottom line is the Russians have said, and we had a hint of this earlier

this week when the Ukrainians started using the American provided HIMARS, the multiple launch rocket system with greater range and accuracy than existing systems in the Ukrainian inventory, using them not only to hit Russian military targets, but to pound the civilian areas in Lugansk and Donetsk. So the Russians came out and said, the war can't stop with simply retaking the Donbass. We must extend our presence so that we keep the Ukrainians out of range of the citizens of Lugansk and donetsk that means you know 80 to 100 kilometers uh past the borders but it's going to go beyond that now now we're talking about

literally the physical dismemberment of Ukraine and it will look the same does Putin want Keeve the capital I don't believe so um I think he would prefer that the Capitol be turned over to a, I'll be honest, a puppet state, a puppet government, a government that's pro-Russian or truly, truly neutral, because he would never tolerate an either independent or pro-Western country with the animosity that the people that live there have towards Russia on his border. He just wouldn't tolerate that. Am I right? No, you're right. But you know, we can talk about the animosity that the people of Ukraine have towards Russia right now. That's animosity built upon the ability to have animosity. They're not going to have that pretty soon. You have animosity to Russia, you're going to die. I don't mean to be blunt, but Russia is tired of playing games.

They've said, Putin said a while back, I haven't even begun. And now the Russians are saying, we're going to start cranking up the pain factor. You know, I remember people were saying, the Russians have ran out of ammunition. Oh, they haven't. You know, they had these caliber missiles that they were firing, they're going boom, and everybody's going, oh, the caliber is pretty impressive. Well, they've just, they started deploying something called the 305E, this precision guided weapon that nobody knew about nobody knew about how the russians are going yeah here they are and we got more are we still supplying uh the ukrainians with hardware your uh friend and colleague and good

friend of the show colonel uh doug Colonel Douglas McGregor says the answer is yes we're actually supplying we've finished supplying them with warehoused hardware we're now supplying them with new stuff that was originally purchased to defend the United States so the money that congress authorized is going to the manufacturers to to build new equipment for us because the recently built stuff for us is now in Ukraine or on its way there. Or is it already there or are we still supplying? In other words, is this going to stop or is Joe Biden going to keep giving the Ukraine's military equipment as a result of which the Russians will kill the Ukrainians? No, it's ongoing and it will continue to go. That's the whole purpose of Lend-Lease

in perpetuity. Congress is apparently willing to write whatever checks necessary to continue this process. All the while, American cities are begging for money from Congress to help with the real problems here at home. Now we're going to instead send tens of billions of dollars to the Ukraine. You know, let me put this in perspective for Americans. HIMARS, that's sort of the big ticket item right now, this multiple launch rocket system. We've provided the Ukrainians, I think, with 6,000 rounds. The majority of those rounds have been blown up by the Russians, by the way. They're not going to be fired.

They're blown up. Russians Russians, by the way. They're not going to be fired. They're blown up. Russians have blown up warehouses. But that's one-third of the inventory. One-third. If we go to war against somebody and we're required to put out massive amounts of firepower to help our troops survive on the battlefield, because that's what it's about. We don't have the HIMARS rounds. Let me stop you. When you say one third of the inventory, you mean one third of American inventory. Yeah, the only inventory that counts. We had 18,000.

Joe Biden, let me just finish this thought. I think you agree because you're giving me these ideas. Joe Biden is undermining the national security of the United States of America by sending vital instruments of national defense to the Ukrainians. Yes, we did it with the Javelins, and now we're doing it with HIMARS. We are depleting the stocks we would need to go fight and win a war. Because I'm telling you right now, as a former Marine, I don't want to fight a war if we're not trying to win it. I don't want to go in there and say, hey, we're going to fight, but bam, oh, you knocked me out. God, so bad. No, you send me to war, I better win, which means you better have the equipment I need

to carry out the doctrinal tactics and operations that I've been trained to do. Joe Biden just pleaded that. We don't have enough HIMARS rounds right now to sustain a modern fight against a Russian-style enemy. So all those brave Americans right now saying, send in the American troops. We'll show them. No, you won't. All you show is that we'll get a bunch of dead Americans coming home because we've abandoned them before the fight even began. The president was quoted by our mutual friend and colleague with whom we'll be on Saturday, about which more later, Phil Giraldi, as having said in Poland two weeks ago to American troops, as I'm sure, and I'm paraphrasing, as I'm sure some of you know, you're going to Ukraine and then

like this, like he likes to do, and some of you have just been there. Is this true that American troops have been there? And if so, are they in uniform? And if not, do they understand the international consequences of military personnel in a battle zone not in uniform? They could be summarily executed legally if they were captured by the Russians? You know, I hesitate to answer this, but I'm going to because that's why you have me here. I'm not here to play games. Joe Biden is not mentally capable of being the commander in chief right now. He's a man who slips in and out of consciousness when it comes to being aware.

They have to give him a little piece of paper that tells him to sit, to stand up, to blink. When he did this, what he was referring to wasn't some covert operation. He was referring to the fact that we had Americans rotating through Ukraine on a permanent basis prior to February 24th. So he was trying to allude to the fact that, hey, some of you were there training the Ukrainians. And he said, some of you are going to be there again. No, he could have slipped his mind. It's not the 82nd Airborne.

We have American troops in Ukraine. I'm just here to tell you right now. They suck. And I'm not giving away secrets because people have written about this. Joint Special Operations Command has personnel on the ground in Ukraine overseeing the logistical aspect, the intelligence that comes with the logistics.

In uniform or not, because you know that's the linchpin to the protections of the Geneva Conventions, being in uniform with a recognizable insignia. No, JSOC hardly, when they go covert, JSOC doesn't wear uniforms. That's just the way it is. They may have some uniforms in their bag they can put on if they're going to be, but they're not supposed to get captured. The point is we have American troops on the ground in a very dangerous situation. The Russians know this. What happens if a few of them get captured or killed. And the press learns of this. I mean, if the press learns of it, probably nothing because Biden will convince the press not to talk about it. I also believe, you know, the Russians are big boys. They play this game too. They have their people running around the world doing similar things.

And I don't think the Russians,ians the russians will make their political hay off of the mercenaries i don't think the russians are um going to deliberately try to provoke a crisis by capturing these people i think they may try to kill some of them um but i you know look if the russians wanted to capture some of these guys they could they have very good guys just like we have very good guys and it could get really ugly the russians know what's going on i mean this is this is the irony that the russians are letting us do things that are killing russians but they're letting us do it because it's not going to change the outcome the russians have a strategic vision that says we're going to win anyways no matter what so we're not going to create diversions here. We're just going to keep

winning. And you can play your little JSOC commando games. Go ahead. You guys know it's not helping because we intercept your communications. We identify the warehouse and we blow it up. And you know we blew it up because you just moved the stuff in there last night, so you know we detected it. Doesn't American intelligence, doesn't the Secretary of Defense, doesn't the Secretary of State know all this? They should. What do they tell the president? What they think he wants to hear? Well, we've seen this before. We saw this in the buildup to the war in Iraq, where the president made a determination that we're going to war in Iraq because of a threat posed by weapons of mass

destruction. So every major cabinet member basically took the book so they could tell the president what he wanted to hear. Joe Biden is being told what he wants, or the people managing Joe Biden. But the bottom line is we know this president's a liar. Come on, guys. Remember, July 23rd of last year, he got on the phone to Ashraf Ghani, the Afghan president, and told him to lie about the reality of the situation, to say things. And here's the key point. Even if it's not true, he ordered the president of Afghanistan to lie about the situation on the ground in Afghanistan, the perception of everything's going well, because that was

the lie Biden was telling the American people. Biden is lying to the American people right now about Ukraine, straight up lying. And his cabinet members are facilitating that lie by suppressing the truth, not telling the president to hold facts. How about professional intelligence people? He must meet with them, or maybe Ron Klain meets with them, the chief of staff. I don't know. Somebody in the White House must meet with intel professionals. Are they telling him the truth or are they telling him what they think he wants to hear? Because if it's the latter, they're not doing their jobs.

No, we don't have senior intelligence professionals anymore. And I'll just straight up say that. And I challenge anybody in the CIA to contradict me on this. You may have gone in as a junior analyst, meaning wanting to tell the truth. You were schooled on how to tell the truth. But then you found out that when you wrote something that went against policy direction, it died at mid-management level. And you learned that if you're ever going to get promoted to mid-management level,

you don't rock the boat. You write what management wants you to write, but you get that promotion. Once you get to mid-management, then you feed the lies to senior management. The CIA, the American intelligence community is fundamentally broken because we've taken integrity out of it and we've inserted politics. We have politicized intelligence. Wow. Let me switch gears a little bit, even though what you just said is quite dramatic. How disastrous for American national security was the president's recent trip to the Middle East? Well, first of all, we... I know you've written about this.

I read the piece and I loved it. So I basically want you to take the ball and run with it on that. It's a little bit of a different topic. But the people that are emailing me and the people that watch the show and the people that love you want to hear about this. No, I appreciate the opportunity. There are two phases to this trip. The first was to Israel, where we were supposed to work with the Israelis to create a solid front against the Iranians, because, of course, the Iranian nuclear deal, JCPOA, is collapsing, despite Biden saying he wanted to go back in. He's not going to go back in. But when he set a meeting with the Israeli prime minister,

he met with a caretaker because the Israeli government collapsed. They've been having this ongoing political crisis. So, you know, he's meeting with a fake political leader to talk about a fake solution to a fake problem, meaning that they said, we're going to stand up tall to Iran. We're going to pretend that we're going to be ready to attack Iran, attack Iran, attack Iran. And we're going to do it. Iran, don't you dare develop the capability for nuclear weapons. Iran doesn't want them. The Iranians came back and said, yeah, well, guess what, guys? We're producing the 60. We can go to 90.

That's percent enrichment uranium. Any time we want, and there's nothing you can do to stop us. So basically, Biden left Israel being shown the door by the Iranians saying, you're a joke. The Israelis are a joke. There's nothing you can do. Now you say, wait a minute. American Israel is pretty strong. Why can't they do some of the stuff, the Iranians? Because if you bomb Iran, Iran destroys all the oil production in the Middle East.

And there's a reason why Biden was going to say that. I want you to say that again, because Joe Biden did say he would not hesitate to use force, along with the Israelis. I don't think the Israelis could take on Iran alone, could they? No, the Israelis can't take on Iran alone. The Israelis are realists. They know that they can't have a war with Iran without the United States. But the United States and Israel preemptively attacked Iran to try and destroy its nuclear weaponry capability.

Iran would destroy the oil-producing mechanisms in the Middle East that would have a catastrophic effect on Western Europe and on the United States. It would be the end of the world as we know it. The end of the world as we know it. Look at the problem we're having right now by just taking Russian oil off the market. That doesn't mean the Russians aren't producing the oil. They are. So the oil is still there't mean the Russians aren't producing the oil. They are. So the oil is still there, and yet we still have this energy crisis.

Iran would destroy the capacity of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Bahrain, everybody else. They would no longer be able to produce oil ever again. Is Iran the threat to Western civilization as the Israelis and the Biden administration have made it out to be? No, Iran, because here's the kicker. When Iran does this, they're committing suicide because their oil production will be eliminated and they're gone. But Iran's basically saying, if you want to come at us, we're taking everybody down with us iran would prefer to produce oil to sell oil to bring in money to build up their society and live in peace with everybody that's what they want to do um we're not letting them do that uh you know the the problem again i'm not here to pretend that

the theocracy is the ideal form of government it's not for at least for me it might be for the iranians it's not for me but the i've been to iran i've met the iranians i've met the government they want to live in peace you know they didn't start the war in iraq we did they didn't start the conflict in syria we did they didn't start the conflict in yemen saudi arabia did with our backing they're simply responding to the conflicts that we started, which were designed to destroy Iran. Remember how we blame NATO and the United States for the Ukrainian conflict? Every conflict in the Middle East is the fault of the United States and its allies. Iran didn't start these fights. The fact that Iran is finishing these fights by winning

these fights, that's a different conversation altogether. But no, the Iranians want to live in peace. And guess who they're living in peace with? Russia. Putin just traveled to Iran. Right there. It's a $40 billion. Picture Putin on the front page of yesterday's Wall Street Journal holding hands with the two theocrats who run the government in Iran.

He doesn't need the West. Wow. Well, in Biden, remember why biden went to saudi arabia they can they can spin it any they want he went to get saudi arabia to increase oil production correct that required him that required him to meet with muhammad bin sultan if you remember when biden was running for office he said i will never meet with this man he's a pariah saudi arabia must be isolated from the world. Well, he just crawled there, fist bumped with the dude. And the guy basically told him, all that stuff you want with energy, we're going to hold off till August.

Because in August, we have a meeting with the people that count. OPEC plus. Oh, the plus, by the way, is Russia. So we're going to be meeting with the Russians to determine how much energy we're going to produce. So the irony is that Russia will dictate how much energy is produced by the Middle East to meet America's needs. Russia's in charge, Biden. Russia's in charge, not you. You blew it, pal. You blew it. Let me take you back to where we started. How much longer will there be conflict in Ukraine? At least till the end of the year.

At least till the end of the year. Are there people, Scott, in the Biden administration who understand this as you do, but whose words and ideas have been suppressed or kept from the president and from Tony Blinken, the secretary of state? I think there's people who understand it. It's not about their words being suppressed. These are political people who've sold their souls. These are people who know what the truth is, but have opted instead to be involved in the shaping of perception for political reasons. It's more important for these Democrats right now to try and salvage the midterm elections

than it is to do something that's good for American national security. They're selling our national security down the river for their political benefit. Newsflash, Biden, you're going to lose in November. It's going to happen. Probably going to lose big time before we know it. So why don't you do what's good for America and stop this nonsense? You know, stop pretending we can prevail in Ukraine. We can't. Stop pretending that your sanctions policy is somehow going to hurt Russia more than it's hurting your allies. It isn't.

Why don't you come and do the right thing, end this nonsense today, preserve Ukraine for as much as it can be preserved, stabilize the global economy, hopefully stabilize the European economy so that you don't have your European allies freezing to death this winter, man, God, I wouldn't want to be a European friend of America. Because Biden's doing everything possible to ensure that the European people, our allies, are suffering this winter. All right. Now I want to look in the camera and say to those watching, if you like what you just saw, and if you want to see Ritter on fire live and in person this Saturday, and if you live in the New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Connecticut area, this Saturday in Kingston, New York, we are all the guests of our friend and colleague, Gerald Salenti, Scott Ritter, whom you know from the show, Phil Giraldi, whom you know from the show, Gary Null, a friend of Salenti's and of mine, and some entity called the Hot Damn Band. I don't know what that is. I prefer Beethoven, but this is not an environment

for Beethoven. This is a beautiful garden. There'll be music, there'll be food, there'll be plenty to drink of everything you might want to drink. And even each of us is going to speak for about 30 minutes. I'm going to be on fire. Giraldi's going to be on fire. I don't have to tell you that Ritter's going to be on fire because you just saw him on fire. So Scott, we'll see you Saturday, hopefully with five or 600 people in that beautiful garden. It's always a pleasure, Scott. Thanks for joining us on Judging Freedom. Thanks for having me. Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom. We'll see you next time.