Judging Freedom - [ SPECIAL ] w/ SCOTT RITTER – Free Speech & The DOJ attack on Independent Journalism

Episode Date: September 6, 2024

[ SPECIAL ] w/ SCOTT RITTER – Free Speech & The DOJ attack on Independent JournalismSee 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 Friday, September 6th, 2024. Scott Ritter joins us. Scott, thank you for coming back on the show. Much appreciated, particularly on a summer Friday late in the day. Deeply, deeply appreciated, my dear friend. I want to talk to you about the suppression of free speech by the federal government and what our friend and colleague Ray McGovern believes is acclimating Americans for a war. But before we get there, I just want to pick your brain a little bit on some of the more recent international developments. What's the latest on Kursk and on what's becoming of the Ukrainian troops there?

Well, I mean, again, just reflecting the reality that I'm thousands of miles distant from the battlefield and thanks to U.S. sanctions, it's become more difficult to gain access to Russian sources who are intimately familiar. You know, I can only go off of what's available. The Ukrainians are still in Kursk. The Russians have not driven them out. This is a political embarrassment for the Russian government, but it's not a strategic disaster. In fact, it's clear that Kursk is turning into a strategic disaster for the Ukrainians.

In order to sustain their position, they've had to reinforce the troops that are there, meaning that they're losing a lot of troops. They've lost, depending on some counts, four to five, 6,000 soldiers. Now they're bringing in more and they're suffering casualties as they go up. So Kursk is weakening rather than strengthening the Ukrainians. It's not weakening the Russians who have not diverted meaningful forces away from their primary battlefield in the Donbas. So I think the Russians are happy to let this situation play out over time and confident that at the end of the day, every Ukrainian who's currently in Russia will either end up dead, captured, wounded, or having been expelled. to Kursk with them, including the modern American tanks, German tanks, British tanks, infantry fighting vehicles, artillery, the billions of dollars of equipment that U.S. and European taxpayers provided to the Ukrainians, that will remain in Russia destroyed or captured. The attack on the military academy in Poltava.

Are you familiar with this bizarre tale of an American Army lieutenant colonel allegedly dying in Poland at the very moment of the attack in Poltava, the implication being he was one of the instructors and was killed there, but the Department of Defense is not going to admit where he was when he died. Does this make any sense to you? We know there were Swedish and Polish instructors among'm familiar with the story. I'm also familiar with, you know, disguising deaths. You know, back in the day when the night stalkers were getting off the ground, operational deaths would be disguised as training accidents. That's something you do with covert units and covert activities um there was no reason for this uh this colonel to be at poltava um you know it's not an american driven training um uh environment uh the swedes were there uh getting the ukrainians spun up on the

airborne early warning and command and control systems. They were bringing in two Swedish aircraft and Swedish radars. So there's a significant Swedish delegation there. And then there were various contractors, maybe some active duty military personnel from NATO countries who were working with Ukrainians on drone operations, how to counter electronic warfare, how to make use of new technologies, et cetera. But there's no reason for an American to be there. And again, I think the American embassy would be very reticent about having Americans go off and expose themselves to this very incident. So I treat this particular report with a bit of skepticism. If Americans were there, well, let me state it this way.

Wouldn't Russian intel know who was there, whether they were Americans, Swedes, Poles, Brits, or Mossad? I think the fact that Russia struck this facility at the time they struck this facility and achieved the results that they got by striking this facility means the Russians knew darn well what was going on there and who was doing it. So they would have known if there were Americans there, yes. Okay. Switching gears to the topic of the interference with free speech, Chris, in chronological order, directly following each other, cuts 9, 10, and 18. The subject matter and content of many of the videos published by the company are often consistent with Russia's interest in amplifying U.S. domestic divisions in order to weaken U.S. opposition to core Russian interests, particularly its ongoing war in Ukraine. The company never disclosed to the influencers or to their millions of followers its ties to RT

and the Russian government. Instead, the defendants in the company claimed that the company was sponsored by a private investor. But that private investor was a fictitious persona the charges and seal this morning do not represent the end of the investigation it remains active and ongoing our investigation revealed that since at least last year rt has used people living and working inside the U.S. to facilitate contracts with American media figures to create and disseminate Russian propaganda here. The content was pitched as legitimate independent news when, in fact, much of it was created in Russia by RT employees who work for the Russian government. I guess in their warped minds, there's an exception in the First Amendment for whatever the government characterizes as Russian propaganda. And I guess in their warped minds,

they're both lawyers. One is the Attorney General, the other is the head of the FBI. They forgot that the whole purpose of the First Amendment is to keep the government out of the business of evaluating the content of speech. You've been victimized by this. Look, what they're saying is ridiculous. I just want to remind, when I graduated from college in 1984 with a Russian history major and went into the Marine Corps as an intelligence officer because of my Russian specialization. The CIA was actively involved in doing a couple things. One, they would intercept and they would read the newspapers, the radio, the television, a broadcast in Russia and translate them into English language and publish them in unclassified volumes. Why? So that everybody who was a specialist in Russia, everybody who had an

interest in this could read what the Russian press was saying, could hear what they were saying on radio and on TV. We never shied away from that. And this is 1984 when the KGB was involved in a frontal assault on America, trying to tip the scales of democracy against Ronald Reagan, whom they did not want to be reelected. So there was very active intelligence operations involved to influence the American election. And what did the CIA do? Build a wall to wall off Russian thought, Russian information? No, they said, here it is. Why? We weren't afraid of our skins back then. We were proud of who we were. We were confident in who we were. What you saw there with Merrick Garland and Christopher Wray are two men who have allowed

their jobs, important jobs, to be politicized by the Biden administration, a Biden administration that is scared of its skin, scared of who America is. Notice what he said. He didn't say they made things up. He said they simply said there's problems in America. Well, guess what, Christopher Wray? Guess what, Derek Garland? There are problems in America, and it's my duty and responsibility as an American to point these out, especially in an election year. This is insanity what they're doing. They are deliberately, it's not the Russians interfering in the election of 2024. It's the Department of Justice, it's the Attorney General, and it's the FBI and the FBI Director who are specifically

getting involved to prevent any criticism of the Biden administration. Anything that says everything ain't coming up smelling roses today in America. We got problems here and maybe we want to fix it. And maybe the way to fix it isn't to reelect those people. I'm not saying that that's my position. I'm just saying that appears to be what Christopher Wray and Merrick Garland are scared of right now. This is, as you said, a frontal assault on free speech, a frontal assault on a free press. Why we're scared of anything that gets published by the Russians, I don't know. I'm an American.

I'm not scared of anything, and I'm damn sure not going to let the opinion of a foreign country, even one that I think is okay, Russia, I'm not going to let it sway me whatsoever. The American people have an inherent ability to discern between fact and fiction. The American people are able to judge for themselves what's best for the people of America. And the idea that we're so stupid, we're so ignorant, we're so gullible that we're going to look at a video and say, oh, wow, I guess I'm going to change my vote. It's stupid. This is ignorance, and it's an insult to every American. And it hurts.

I mean, your home was raided. Your property was violated. The privacy of your house was assaulted under pretext that we don't even know about. Dmitry Symes is a Russian who works for Russians in Russia, and he's been indicted for that because he also owns real estate in America and is also an American citizen who worked for three presidents of the United States, for gosh sakes. These guys will stop at nothing. It makes me wonder if there isn't some sort of an October surprise that's going to come if they think that the vice president is losing her race to former President Trump. Ray McGovern thinks that this is acclimating the American people for a war, either with Iran or with Russia. I don't disagree with Ray. This is about the dumbing down of America. And let me just point something else out too. These indictments are based upon allegations, unproven allegations that are not going to be challenged. If you're a Russian or a Russian American who's not in the

United States, you're not coming back to the United States to do that adversarial confrontation in a court of law. No Americans have been indicted as of yet. And according to some news outlets, they're probably not going to. Why? Because this is information warfare. This is the Justice Department putting out indictments that will be treated as fact by the mainstream media, by the American people, since they will go unchallenged. They did this in 2020, by the way, when they, if you remember Concord, it was a company in Russia accused of running bot farms. And they did that, but Concord did something different. They challenged it. And you know what the Justice Department ended up having to do? Drop the case because it couldn't withstand an adversarial challenge. And so here's what I'm trying to tell your audience. If most of these charges were

challenged, they'd have to be dropped because they're flimsy as hell. I would think they would be dropped before they even got to a jury because all of this is speech. All of this is absolutely protected speech, whether it's speech that Merrick Garland thinks Vladimir Putin wants us to hear, whether it's hate speech, whether it's offensive speech, whatever it is, it's speech. It's absolutely protected. Not to be outdone and not to raise your blood pressure. Here's Baghdad Bob weighing in, number appropriate, will do. We'll make it harder for them. Will it make it completely impossible? Probably not, because they'll find workarounds.

I mean, these are actors, in this case driven by the Kremlin itself, that are bound and determined to try to change and influence the way Americans vote when they go in that ballot box. And that's why I said at the end of my opening statement, everybody, not just the federal government, but everybody needs to be concerned about this. And everybody needs to bear hand in pushing back on the influence attempts by Russia. You know, Admiral Kirby makes the Attorney General and the FBI Director actually seem rational by comparison. He is really, really off the deep end. I sort of feel sorry for him. He's because this is indefensible, what he's saying and what he's trying to defend. Before we jump on to Secretary Austin, do you have any thoughts on, and this is the same nonsense over and over again, he just threw Iran in. I'll just stick on the Russia angle of it. And I'll help you make some breaking news here. I don't know if anybody will pick up on this, but back when I was planning to go, I did go to Russia in December. You were going to come with me, but you had some issues that precluded that. I had submitted a request to interview Vladimir Putin and Dmitry

Medvedev, actually to have us interview them. And the response I got back after an initial, we'll consider it, was the decision has been made at the highest level not to allow interviews because they didn't want to get involved, be seen as, you know, getting involved in American politics during an election year. Now, then they turned around, allowed Tucker Carlson to come in and interview the president, which, you know, makes that declaration somewhat spotty. But my point is, my experience has always been that the Russians take an extremely hands-off position on this. I interviewed Anatoly Antonov, who's the ambassador, and he took it a step further. He said, look, the number one requirement for Russia in terms of what they want is predictability.

So we don't care who's in the White House as long as they're predictable. We prefer someone who has predictable friendship. But a predictable enemy is better than somebody who we don't know where they're coming from because it's hard to build policy around chaos. And the implication was, and at the time he made the statement, it was Biden and Trump. The clear implication was that the Russians were actually leaning towards Biden because he was predictable. Trump is chaos. And so the reason why I bring that up is the entire underlying theme of Christopher Wray and Merrick Garland and others is that the Russians are trying to support Donald Trump,

that they're in it to push the lever down in favor of Donald Trump. And I'm here to tell you right now, Donald Trump is the last person the Russians want in the White House because he's unpredictable. Here's someone who is stupidly predictable. Cut number two. Ukraine continues to seize the initiative on the battlefield. Ukraine's troops are now conducting an operation in Russia's Kursk region. The Kremlin's army of aggression is now on the defensive on its own turf. But we know that Putin's malice runs deep. Moscow continues its offensive in the east of Ukraine, especially around Pokrusk. Putin is repositioning his troops in Kursk. And the Kremlin continues to bombard Ukraine's cities and to target Ukraine's civilians.

That is an outrage. Kidding me? Bombarding cities and killing civilians is an outrage? How many billions in equipment have you, Lloyd Austin, sent to Benjamin Netanyahu to do exactly that? And isn't he doing exactly that even as we speak? Well, he's also doing it with Ukraine by giving Ukrainians weapons that are being used to target civilian areas inside Russia um look every civilian death in wartime is a is a tragedy um unfortunately war especially modern war there will be civilian casualties uh this conflict right now the civilian casualty the military casualty ratio is the lowest in modern history, which means that the concept of Russian

indiscriminate bombing of the Ukrainian civilian population is not borne by the facts. And don't take my word for it, take the Washington Post and Human Rights Watch organizations that are not pro Russian at all. They've come out and said that the many, if not most, of the civilian deaths that are happening in Ukraine are caused because the Ukrainian government uses Ukrainian civilians as human shields, putting military equipment in civilian areas, et cetera. So Lloyd Austin is just off his rocker right now. And I just want to point out again to your audience, he sat there and made it sound as if Ukrainian forces on Russian soil is a good thing. It's a NATO and American motivated, organized and led invasion of Russia. As we speak, the Russians are in the process of promulgating a new nuclear

doctrine. This nuclear doctrine will lower the threshold for the use of nuclear weapons, I believe, and will also endorse and embrace a policy of nuclear preemption, meaning that if they feel that the United States using the Ukrainian proxy is going to use weapons, including non-nuclear weapons, to carry out strikes against Russian strategic command and control, that the Russians have a right to preempt such a strike using nuclear weapons and a target base that will not be limited to Ukraine. That's our future right now because of idiots like Lloyd Austin, because of idiots like Tony Blinken, because of idiots like Jake Sullivan and the President of the United States, unfortunately. They are literally walking down a path of nuclear

annihilation and the American people are ignorant of it. And when people like me try to educate the American people about Soviet nuclear doctrine, which I get educated on by talking to Russians, I'm called a Russian asset and they shut down my ability to interface with Russian experts. I mean, at a moment in time when we must, we the people must be empowered by knowledge and information, the U.S. government is making that empowerment criminal. Seated next to Secretary Austin was President Zelensky. Chris, cuts number one and three back to back. We need to have this long-range capability, not only on the occupied territory of Ukraine, but also on the Russian territory.

Yes, so that Russia is motivated to seek peace. Putin wants more Ukraine to occupy than he wants security for Russia. He doesn't care about Russian land and people. He just wants to grab as much of our land and as many of our cities as possible. How unseemly is it for him to be asking for offensive weaponry that could reach Moscow in public? This is not a phone call to Jake Sullivan. This is in public, seated next to the Secretary of Defense. I wish the Secretary of Defense would have turned to Zelensky and said,

you do understand that Russia's not at war with you. You do understand that, right? And you do understand the difference between a special military operation and war. The fact that you're sitting next to me, still alive alive sort of is proof positive that Russia's not at war with you. So why do you want to go to war with Russia? Because at the end of the day, if Russia does go to war with you, your nation ceases to exist. You cease to exist. All of this ceases to exist. And that's really the stance the United States needs to take, but we're not going to. We play along with this game. We facilitate this madness. Hopefully at the end of the day, we'll say no to him because, you know, as bad as the Biden administration is, I don't see them as being absolutely suicidal and they know

what the consequences will be. I can guarantee you that the Russians have communicated this using back channels, that this is a no mess around time. And if these missiles strike Russian command and control, there will be, there will be an immediate, decisive response by the Russians. And nobody's going to like it. Scott Ritter, thank you, my dear friend. Late in the week, late in the day. Much appreciated. Much appreciated.

Look forward to seeing you again next week. All the best. Thank you. Well, we crammed into four days for you this week, because Labor Day Monday is a holiday here in the U.S. What we normally give you in five next week, spread out to the full five, all of your favorites, all of our regulars, and one or two surprises. Judge Napolitano, one of them's named Ralph Nader. Judge Napolitano for judging freedom. Thanks for watching!