Judging Freedom - Ukraine Drone Hits Russia base 150 Miles From Moscow

Episode Date: December 5, 2022

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Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Monday, December 5th, 2022. It's a little after three o'clock in the afternoon here on the east coast of the United States. Our guest today is no stranger to the Judging Freedom audience. Phil Giraldi is a former officer of the Central Intelligence Agency, known for personal courage and known for telling the truth. You know, when I say that, Phil, it should be something that everybody's known for. But I remember your former colleague, Mike Pompeo, who later would run the CIA and then the State Department, boasting about the felicity with which they stole secrets and lied about it. I guess in the intelligence community, that lying, if done properly, if it's done effectively, is considered a virtue, huh?

Yeah, well, it's called covert action. You're basically setting yourself up as an authority, even though you know you're not, or that you're deliberately lying, and you sell a product. And the product is something that the National Security Council wants, or the director of the CIA himself wants, or indeed the President of the United States wants. And people, when they hear or see the New York Times, for example, quoting a senior intelligence official or Defense Department official whom they don't name, that should be a tip-off right there, that this is a covert action that's being run against the reader. And you have the additional problem that you told

us about, which is that a covert action, though lied about, it may uncover the truth. It's not always the truth that makes its way to the ultimate consumer, whether the consumer is CIA senior management or the Secretary of State or the president of the United States. I mean, here we are, $50 billion invested in Ukraine. The president is about to ask for more. The Republicans seem to be in favor of it. And are his decisions based upon the truth as your former colleagues have ascertained it? Or are his decisions based upon what senior management of the intelligence community thinks he wants to hear? I think I know what the answer is. Well, I think the question answers itself.

The fact is, you know, we're talking about a political process here in which these people are selling a product and the product that the Biden administration and, you know, indeed, the Trump administration before that and the preceding administrations, Republican, Democratic, are always trying to make themselves look good and i i noted the secretary of labor i think it was two days ago making a statement that gee we we need a lot more workers in the united states now this of course is a backhand argument to say that our southern border should be as open as it currently is letting in millions of illegals and uh but this is a kind of the con job that's being pulled. Like, for example, saying that there's no recession going on. Biden said last week, the economy is strong. And this Ukraine business, of course, has been a sell ever since the beginning. There was never any reason from, on God's earth, why the United States should have gotten involved in this, and why this was a national interest for the American people. It never was.

Do you think that Putin expects the United States' 40,000 troops that are currently stationed in Poland to move east across the border into Ukraine, fully armed and ready to attack his military? Well, I would think that that is something that he considers a distinct possibility. And as we keep seeing, we have high potential for accidents to take place, for there to be misunderstandings between the two sides. And this is exactly the formula that one should have tried to avoid because this inevitably escalates the conflict. And we've had more of this, of course, very recently. How good is Russian intel? For example, if the 101st Airborne, which is a part of those 40,000 troops, or if all the 40,000 troops were to begin to mobilize to prepare to move eastward,

would Vladimir Putin know about it before it happened? Yeah, absolutely. Both sides are quite capable using their satellites and their ability to pick up electronic transmissions basically throughout the region and even beyond. If you're mobilizing anything over the size of a battalion, which would be 6 to 800 people, you're going to have a huge electronic footprint as you're getting this organization up and running and moving and the russians would know this uh right from right from literally the minute when it all started um in the past 48 hours actually this might have happened on Monday, Ukraine time. I guess it's still Monday there. Two devices exploded in Russia. I think one was a missile, one was a drone, or they both were drones. There

you go. So you can see on the map where Kiev is in Ukraine, you can see where Moscow is, and you can see the two red squares, a fuel truck exploded at a Russian base that's just 150 miles from the blue dot Moscow to the red dot that's closer to it. And then you see another red dot, an explosion in the area of a Russian air base. Question. Is this the deepest penetration into Russia that the Ukraine military has made? Another question. Wouldn't Putin have known ahead of time that this was coming?

Well, this is, one would have to consider this the deepest penetration if one discounts the assassination of Darya Dugin. OK. Place last month, which may have been more in the nature of an intelligence operation. Now, from my understanding on right media, both of these explosions inside Russia were caused by drones. Otherwise, we would be seeing the alternative argument being made, which was made a couple of months back, which is that the Kievans, the Ukrainians,

have saboteurs and people of that like in place inside Russia, and we're just basically waiting to give them the signal to go ahead. But if the Russians confirmed these were drones, then this was a clear attempt by Zelensky, in my mind, to escalate the war. He tried to do that with the missile that was misdirected, possibly, and wound up in Poland and killed two people. He really pushed it. He

said NATO has to intervene now. Now, this could be another attempt to, shall we say, promote an escalation on the part of the Russians that could possibly be construed as a danger to Poland, danger to troops in Poland, that sort of thing. This is a game that's being played. These two drones, the one 150 miles from Moscow and the other looked like it was about 300 miles south of the first one. I mean, aren't they just pinpricks compared to the damage that the Russians are inflicting on Ukraine. And if you accept that argument that they're pinpricks, why is this being done? Just to taunt, just to irritate, just to aggravate Putin? It's not a setback. Nobody died. I think two people died in one of them, but there were civilians who happened to be there. Yeah, the Russians, I think, are claiming that three people were killed.

But the fact is, this is a provocation. And it doesn't mean that the tide is turning, that the Ukrainians will be able to repeat this process. And certainly, Russian satellite systems and radar systems would have picked up these drones as they were coming in. So the whole purpose of this is, again, political. It's to escalate the process so that Russia, at least in the hopes of Zelensky and his advisors, many of whom were probably American, to basically escalate the process to the point where Russia does something that is really stupid and provocative in return, and this will provoke the NATO-U.S. reaction that Zelensky wants to see. I'm convinced that this is what he's playing at.

Would the U.S. have known? I'm asking it in the subjunctive because I don't know that you would know this personally, but is it likely that the U.S. would have known ahead of time that these drones were making their way hundreds of miles into Russia? And if the U.S. knew about it, did the U.S. approve it? That is really the $64 million question because the United States has the airspace over Ukraine and those parts of Russia covered thoroughly say that they would have known that these that these two drones were on the way but the real question is again the political question did the U.S command in the region know in advance did the White House in the region in the United States know in advance that this was going to take place? And if so, did they approve of it? Because it's again, a clear escalation. It's not

in the US interest to go that route. But we've seen some pretty dumb decision making coming out of the White House and National Security Council and Pentagon lately, so I wouldn't be surprised. All right. Tell me a little bit more about how American intel operates on the ground in Ukraine. We know that American intel is supplying either Ukraine intel or Ukraine military or Ukraine political leadership, or all three, with information about what the Russians are up to. But is American intel also spying on its ally, Ukraine, so that it knows in advance what Ukraine is up to? I would take that as a given. Again, the question becomes one of intent. The United States spies on all its allies, including NATO allies, on a regular basis. This is considered to be a necessity for how you operate intelligence agencies and organizations.

So I'm not surprised by any of that but the fact is is the United States uh basically setting up cover units and setting up liaison elements that are advising the Ukrainians and giving them information that is information that is usable that is useful, that is directable against the Russians, in which case the Russians probably know about this because they do have agents in Ukraine as well. And this is basically setting up a scenario where the United States is directly involved in the war. And that's what scares me a lot about what we're seeing and hearing. What will President Putin consider a victory here? When will he say, OK, we won, we're going home, or OK, we won, we're staying here, or OK, we don't need to fire any more ammunition? Well, Colonel Douglas McGregor a couple of weeks ago made the comment. He said, you know, if the United States really wanted to set up negotiations and

end this war, all the President of the United States would have to do would be pick up the phone and talk to Putin and talk to Zelensky and say, that's where we're going. Putin would welcome it. Putin would welcome some kind of realistic settlement that gives him at least some of the security that he was seeking. And Zelensky would in all probability feel coerced, but he would have to go along with it because basically without the U.S. pushing his buttons, he's got no resources. What does Putin want? Big, big game plan. Long term. We know he wants a multipolar world.

Your phrase from a great piece you recently wrote. What is that? Well, if you go back to Putin's speeches going back 20 years, it's very interesting. He's always been talking the same way, which is essentially feels that um with the breakup of the bipolar uh cold war scenario that essentially all nations that came out of this are are worthy of a certain respect and a certain consideration for the the unique cultures and their unique ways of doing things and he's been saying that over and over again to a stone wall, which has been coming from the NATO and the US side. And the NATO and US side proceeded to expand into Eastern Europe, which they also indicated they were not going to do.

So we have this kind of situation where Putin has been saying this and now he's basically saying look essentially the NATO-US dominance of what is right and what is wrong and that the rest of the world should sit back and be told what to do and obey he says this doesn't work anymore let's be looking at a situation where everybody has a certain respect accorded to them and will be treated by the same international law that will apply to everyone. Is there anybody in the American intelligence community or State Department who thinks like you do, or are they all globalists that want to thrust Western values on Russia? Well, if you want to get promoted in those systems you have to be a globalist and you you have to play along with the woke culture and everything else

that's been going with it so uh yeah that's how the game works but at the working level i assure you i'm still in touch with with former colleagues who are in touch with current colleagues and that sort of thing. There are a lot of people in the system, intelligence and defense and State Department, who are very skeptical about everything that is going on right now. I know your field is intel and not military, but do you have a feel for what is likely to happen in the next three months as bitter cold descends on that part of the world well I have a suspicion that the the onset of winter is of course going to make conditions much more difficult for both sides but the Russians are much better equipped to deal with it so there could be a

dramatic shift in terms of what's going on on the ground. And that's what I would kind of expect to see, which I think could well lead to some kind of movement towards a settlement. But again, the United States has to get out of the way. Is President Zelensky corrupt? I mean, corrupt to the extent that the money we're sending there somehow ends up in his mansion in Miami. He defines corruption. He defines corruption. He's an exemplar of corruption. He was elected president corruptly because he had a multi-billion dollar friend of his who lives in israel uh who was funding uh television ads touting this guy as a savior for

ukraine and everything like that it was all a con job and um ever since and he's basically he and his friends have been taking a slice of what's coming over and recycling that to corrupt our own Congress. And so this process is completely corrupt. And he not only has a house in Miami, he has one in Switzerland, he has another one in Israel. And God knows how big his Swiss bank account is. So I would say, yeah, it'd be interesting to do a little looking and checking and see where

all this money is going. And maybe the US and the White House will get the nerve to do that. All right. What you've told me, told us, must be known by the American intel. Does the President of the United States know this. Yeah, they do know it or at least they intuit it and but the fact is the politics of this situation where Biden and his crew suddenly pulling out the rug on this situation is something that politically they cannot do. So, they're looking for a way to finesse it and uh presumably they they have you know some kind of idea that they can drag this out forever but I think that's a uh that's a

false idea Bill Giraldi always a pleasure my man thank you for your courage and intellectual honesty and and all the analysis that you bring to the show. I can see from the emails, our faithful viewers very much appreciate it. Good. Well, thank you very much. And thank you for having me on. Of course,

we'll do it again before Christmas judge the Paul Tano for judging freedom.