Judging Freedom - Ukraine Offensive Continues to be Slow_ w_Phil Giraldi fmr CIA

Episode Date: June 28, 2023

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Thank you. Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Wednesday, June 28th, 2023. It's about 11 o'clock in the morning here on the East Coast of the United States. Phil Giraldi returns to our cameras. Phil, always a pleasure. Thank you for joining us. With all of the speculation going on now aboutinvolvement of the CIA in Yevgeny Prigozhin's takeover of Rostov-on-Don and march toward Moscow?

Well, I'm not so sure it was a CIA operation per se. I would rather suggest MI6, which seems to have a better working connection with the Ukrainian intelligence service. My speculation is that this might have been a setup coming from any one of a number of directions, including possibly coming from the Kremlin itself, to create this situation, which would have enabled Vladimir Putin to get rid of a guy who was beginning to be a lot of trouble for him. So I think there are a number of possible scenarios we should be looking at. Quite personally, when I'm listening to all the punditry talking about this, I find Colonel Douglas McGregor very convincing. I find Larry Johnson very convincing. I believe you've spoken to both of them recently. And they are the kind

of people that make sense of all of this and put the pieces together. I find them very good. Why do you say MI6, which is the British foreign intelligence, GCHQ is their domestic, I think I have this right, MI6 is their foreign, it's their CIA. Are the Brits, like the Israelis, better at this than the Americans are, or are they just better connected for some reason with Prokosian? Yeah, I think it's the latter. I think that the British have had not necessarily a relationship with him, but a better relationship than we have, a better professional relationship with Ukrainians who I would imagine had some contacts with him. That would be the conduit that I would be thinking to look for. We might find out more of this in the

next few days. There's certainly a lot of backstories, I think, here that have the potential for kind of changing the way we're thinking about it. Colonel McGregor and Larry are of the view that Prokosian may have been a double agent, that the Ukrainians thought he was working for them and the Kremlin knew he was working for the Kremlin. I suppose it depends on whose ox is being gored here, but I would imagine that if Putin suspected for a minute that Prokofiev was a true traitor, he would have been executed by now. Yeah, I would think that would have been the likely outlook or outcome of what was going on. But at the same time, he might have been the real thing.

He might have been a real traitor that was acting like a double agent. I mean, this gets complicated. And somebody like MI6 or CIA operating through the Ukrainians dangled a billion dollars in front of them. You never know. I see a lot of potential issues that could surface in this. And as I say, hopefully we're going to find out a lot more in the next week or so. Well, how does this work? I mean, you were in this business for a while. You approach a foreign person of some importance or an agent of a foreign government and you want to flip them.

Is it often ideological? Is it moral or is it cash? It's probably all of the above. And I would think in this case, our friend probably had a grievance against Putin, which would have made him a very desirable and on the surface anyway, a potential agent, and he might have been recruited. And so, you know, I'm thinking that the two of them have been going back and forth with each other for, you know, some months now. And he might have figured he was on his way out anyway. And this was a way to to kind of maybe turn the story around. I don't know yet. This is again, a lot of this is speculation.

There was news coverage today about the CIA having advanced knowledge that this was going to take place. Now, where does that put us? You know? Yeah. Well, we know that the, I don't know if you ever participated in these briefings or if Ray McGovern has, but we know that the American intelligence community, I don't know who the briefer was. I don't know if it was Averill Haynes, who is the director of national intelligence, or Bill Burns, who's the director of central intelligence. How many levels of authority do they have? Another story for another time. So I don't know who did the briefing, but he or she or someone briefed the Gang of Eight, the Congress within the Congress, the chair and ranking member of the House and Senate Judiciary Committees, the majority and minority, or in the case of the House, the Speaker of the House and the minority leader from each House of Congress. That's the Gang of Eight. They call themselves the Gang of Eight. It's as anti-democratic as lowercase d, as you can imagine. The government shares secrets

with them, but they can't tell anybody. So there's no democracy involved. But somebody briefed the Gang of Eight on Wednesday, it probably was, here's what Prokosian's going to do on Saturday, just to give you a heads up. Yeah, that's quite plausible. Again, this is another one of the closed doors that we're confronting on this story that hopefully will be opening, at least to a certain extent, in the near future. I mean, this was a bizarre episode, and everybody's trying to spin it in whatever direction suits them. Like Blinken obviously coming up with the fact that Putin has definitely damaged goods, very damaged, as a result of this. Well, it depends on how you interpret it and how you interpret the way this went down.

McGregor and Johnson argue that Putin is actually stronger now, that he came off as a patient diplomatic peacemaker, that he did not have Russians shooting at Russians, and he managed to rid himself, at least for a while, of his former chef who had become a public nuisance. Yeah, and I think it was McGregor who also said this would be a kind of wake-up call for Putin to really come up with an overall strategy that works better, whether that would mean taking steps to end the war or taking steps to finish it faster are probably the things that are going through his mind. Here's Secretary of State Blinken. I mean, it's hard to believe that he really believes what he's

saying, but we'll play it anyway and let you comment on it. Secretary of State Blinken on CNN last Sunday, right after all this stuff with Prokosian came to a conclusion. We've seen this aggression against Ukraine become a strategic failure across the board. Russia is weaker economically, militarily. Its standing around the world has plummeted. It's managed to get Europeans off of Russian energy. It's managed to unite and strengthen NATO with new members and a stronger alliance. It's managed to alienate from Russia and unite together Ukraine in ways that it's never been before.

This is just an added chapter to a very, very bad book that Putin has written for Russia. Straight from the neocon playbook. Absolutely. And none of it is true. If you break down that statement by all its little half sentences, you will come up with the conclusion that none of it is true, except that Russia is not supplying energy to Europe. And that's because somebody like the United States blew up a pipeline and making that impossible. But yet that is the argument that CIA, MI6, the State Department, the neocons, the globalists, the Biden administration, Bernie counted six. I guess I could go on and come up with another 10. In the West, want all of us to believe that somehow Putin doesn't know what he's doing. Putin is weak. Russia is weak. And America and our empire building is triumphant.

Yeah, that's precisely what they want us to believe, because they essentially want this war to continue forever until Russia is weakened beyond the point that they're satisfied with it. All it's doing is destroying our own economy and basically setting precepts for the United States to intervene globally that the rest of the world is watching and listening. Let's say that this meeting between American intel leaders and the Gang of Eight last Wednesday was about Prokosian. So if the CIA knew what Prokosian was up to, wouldn't Russian intel know what Prokosian is up to? And wouldn't Ukrainian intel know what Prokosian is up to? And wouldn't Prokosian, who's no dummy, know that they know what he is up to? Well, I would answer yes to all of those hypotheses. But I would add there's always the possibility this was a more clever operation than the way we're seeing it. Not just a double operation or a single operation, maybe a triple operation. Tell us how a clever operation like this might have been carried out and to whose advantage, Phil.

Well, the whole point is that when you have a spy, an agent that you're running, someone like me, a case officer is what it's referred to as, you never can trust the agent. All right, so let's say in this hypothetical, you have an agent of Russian intel who you have flipped to work for you, so now he's a double agent. Right. Take it from there. Do you trust him or don't you?

Do you surveil your own agent to see if he's still your agent? Well, what's in the back of your head is the fact that this guy has betrayed his own country and he's doing something with you probably for money. And so why should you believe that he really loves you and is going to be totally cooperative with you? So you take this one level farther and you have like a triple agent, a guy who's fooling two people and two governments and two parties. I mean, so yeah, I think that there were probably enough signs coming from what Perotian has been saying for the last several months, his complaints and everything like that, that there was something bubbling there. And I think a lot of people probably either had, well, shall we say part of the story and maybe not completely the story.

And of course, you've got to be inside his head to know what he's really thinking. Here is what was inside his head after he landed in Belarus. And it's basically, you know, yesterday we were traitors. Today we're heroes. This was just a protest movement. I'm going to read the subtitles of Mr. Prokosian's comments. We started our march because of injustice. On the way, we did not kill a single soldier on the ground.

In a day, we were only 200 kilometers away from Moscow. We entered and completely took control of the city of Rostov. The civilians were glad to see us. We showed a master class on how 24 February 2022 should have looked. We did not have the goal of overthrowing the existing regime and the legally elected government, which was said many times. We turned around in order not to shed the blood of Russian soldiers. Does Vladimir Putin believe that? And do you believe that, Phil Giraldi?

Well, when you have armed troops marching on the capital of the country, it's pretty hard to see it quite the way he's doing uh because it's just not plausible what he's saying it was all right it's a it's it's a protest movement in a manner of speaking, just as any coup against the government is a protest movement against the government. But he's stretching definitions quite a bit. Do you have any intel as to whether these 25,000 troops knew where they were going and were told what they were doing and was aware that the world was watching? Well, it seems pretty clear that a lot of people knew what was going on. And by the way, I don't think the 25,000 troops were on the move. I think this was basically a much smaller contingent that moved into Rostov and was prepared to possibly march on Moscow, where they would have been confronted by 10 times as many troops.

So, you know, I'm not so sure. Again, this is a narrative that he's constructing, I think, to put him in a positive light. And he can't do anything else but that right now. Here's President Putin on Monday night. He's angry, he's determined, and he's forceful. The mutineers betrayed their country, their people, and they betrayed those who they dragged into this affair, who they pushed to shoot

at their comrades it is this fratricide that the new nazis in kiev and their western masters wanted to see and the various traitors as well they wanted to see russian soldiers kill each other they wanted to see russian servicemen and civilians die and ultimately to see Russia defeated and the Russian society split apart so since the very beginning I gave orders to prevent bloodshed and we needed time for that including to give an opportunity to those who realize they've made a mistake to rethink their decision to realize that they're putting society at risk and that this is leading to destructive consequences as a result of this reckless affair.

I thank the soldiers and commanders of the Wagner Group who made the only correct decision and refused to engage in the fratricide, and who stopped at the last line. Wow. He praises the Wagner leadership. He thanks them. He wanted to give them time to reconsider, and he didn't want to shed their blood. This is not Joe Stalin. This is a very, very different, almost westernized, patient, in control Russian leader. Well, and also, I hadn't seen that whole clip. In the beginning, it seems to me he's pointing the finger at the U.S. and NATO for having engineered this.

I think that's kind of a little bit of a hint there. Yes, yes, yes. He blames us for fomenting, well, us, not you and I, not the people watching us. He blames the CIA for fomenting fratricide and for supporting neo-Nazis. Well, the neo-Nazis would be Zelensky and his crew. Fomenting fratricide, I guess, would be Russians fighting Russians. Right. I mean, he must have some intel. I mean, his Russian intelligence must have said Langley knows all about this. They can stop it, but they're not going to do anything about it.

That was probably in the back of his mind as he made that statement. Or I would take it one step farther, even suggesting that Langley and London might have been behind engineering this, creating this. We don't know yet. Hal, I want to get to your piece, Washington Loves War Criminals, which was provoked by an effort by your member of Congress, if I have this correct, to rename a post office in a town near where you live after a person you believe is a war criminal who slaughtered hundreds of thousands but was never prosecuted for it. The former United States ambassador to the United Nations and the former Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright. What provoked this, I believe, was this effort to change the name of the post office, but if you pull that scab off, the blood that comes out is neocon. So what are the neocons and how dangerous are they and where are they? Well, yeah, as you point out, my objection was my local post office was going to change its name to honor Madeleine Albright. And I laid out the the argument against that the fact that

uh she has committed a number of war crimes uh she basically is a neoconservative the neoconservatives this is what's really disturbing is that the neoconservatives have basically taken over uh foreign policy uh of the united states. They are the spokesmen for the foreign policy of both the Democrats and the Republicans. And this is the kind of antics that go on. I think I said in the article that the big difference now between the Democrats and Republicans is over social issues. Everybody accepts on both sides of the line that the U.S. should, by right, be using its military power to set the rules for the rest of the world. And this is a neocon invention, something that the neocons basically brought about by,

very cleverly, some neocons identify as Democrats, some as Republicans. So they managed to cover both sides of the argument, and they wound up getting pretty much what they want, a country that basically exists right now to go to war. And would Lindsey Graham and Tony Blinken, a self-styled conservative Republican, Graham, a self-styled liberal Democrat, Blinken, be examples of neocons who subscribe to this ideology that Madeleine Albright foisted upon the government when she became Secretary of State. Yeah, and of course, there are more names than that we can pull out of the hat. I also noted in the article, there are very few people in the Congress that speak out against the war policy. And I can think of Massey, and I could think of Senator Paul.

But, you know, you can count them pretty much on one hand. They're the libertarians in the Republican Party and the progressives in the Democratic Party. But you're right. You can count them on one hand because basically Congress is controlled by the war party with a Republican wing and a Democrat wing. And the only way to stop this would be if a libertarian or a progressive were in the White House. Otherwise, Congress, without declaring war, because there's no legal basis to declare it, Russia doesn't pose an imminent military threat to the U.S. We pose an imminent military threat to Russia. They pose no threat to us. So the only way to do this is the spending power, which the Supreme Court has said Congress can

spend its money, our money, it's not its money, however it sees fit. They want to give old Joe a blank check for $113 billion. They can give it to him and he can sneak troops on the ground saying, well, this equipment's too sophisticated for the Ukrainians to operate. I have to have troops there to operate it. And that's the way they get around the Constitution, and that's the way they act with near unanimity. Yeah, absolutely. And of course, the fact is that we've fought a number of wars in the last 20 years, and we've never declared war once. And there's never been an imminent threat even once. Did Iraq threaten us? Well, it did if you went with the fake intelligence reports that the neocons were pushing through the Pentagon and through the vice president's office.

What did Ray McGovern tell George W. Bush about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction? I wasn't in the room at the time, so I don't know. Well, according to Ray, he told them, Mr. President, they don't blanking exist. And Bush said, get the blank out of here. You're ruining my day. You're ruining my day. You're ruining my administration. You're telling the truth, Ray. Do CIA briefers ever tell a president an uncomfortable truth?

We've been through this a hundred times, Phil. Or do they tell him what they think he wants to hear? Depends on the briefer, I guess. A guy like Ray, I can believe, would stick by principle. But I've known some of the other presidential briefers, and I don't think so in their cases. I think they would tell him what he wants to hear. Before we close today, what's your gut on Prokofiev? A Kremlin tool, a Kremlin ally, a crazy person, a threat to Putin. What does your gut tell you with all your years monitoring monitoring russians and comprehending u.s uh intel data i would guess that this when we eventually find out what this was all about we will probably um decide that it was largely personal that he feel he felt he was not

appreciated as much as he should have been by the Kremlin, that there were certain incidents that he was unhappy about, and he felt that he wasn't getting the right feedback. And I would think it was more personally motivated than anything else. But there could be some surprises. Bill Giraldi, always a pleasure, my dear friend. Thank you very much for joining us. I don't know when we'll speak next because next week is a short week, but a happy Independence Day when the colonies seceded from Great Britain, probably

the last moral war we ever fought. All the best, my dear friend. Thank you. Thank you for watching. If you like this, like and subscribe. We're up to 173,000 subscriptions. Our goal is 175,000 by next Tuesday, which is Independence Day. I'm confident we'll make it because of you.

More as we get it. Jack Devine will give us a very different version of all of this from Phil Giraldi at 3.30 this afternoon Eastern. Judge the Montano for judging freedom. so we've got a number one deluxe meal. Is there anything else I can get you? Yeah, I'd also like a good night's sleep. Excuse me, sir? You know, the I didn't struggle all night with my uncomfortable CPAP mask,

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