Judging Freedom - _Ukraine_s Offensive is READY_ Zelenskyy _ Ray McGovern fmr CIA

Episode Date: June 5, 2023

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Resolve to earn your degree in the new year in the Bay with WGU. With courses available online 24-7 and monthly start dates, WGU offers maximum flexibility so you can focus on your future. Learn more at wgu.edu. Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Monday, June 5th, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Monday, June 5th, 2023. It's 1030 in the morning here on the East Coast of the United States. Ray McGovern joins us now. Ray, always a pleasure. Thank you very much for coming back. Thank you for

starting the week with us, Ray. I look forward to it every Monday morning, and so many of our fans look forward to your insight as well. We have some clips we'll run later on in your time with us of President Zelensky indicating how prepared the Ukraine military is for their so-called spring offensive. And it got me to thinking, what role, if any, is there played by U.S. intelligence in informing him of just how ready he is or how ready the Russians are for him? It's very marginal. I mean, the intelligence has been so politicized, Judge, that you have people like the Director of National Intelligence, Averill Haynes, saying just two months ago that she's very optimistic about the counteroffensive because Russia is running out of ammunition and running out of rockets, and they have no indigenous capability to produce them. Where are you getting that?

Where is she getting that stuff from? Ukrainian liaison. Has that come through? Comes through the CIA. Is there some sort of comment or break on that? Apparently not. Otherwise, the director of national intelligence wouldn't be saying these stupid things. I mean, it is the Ukrainians, not the Russians, who lack the internal ability to produce weapons and ammunition. Could she possibly be confusing the two, just as our

friend Jack Devine did when he said the seven to one kill ratio favored the Ukrainians rather than the Russians. Yeah. Well, I forgive Jack earlier than I would forgive the director of national intelligence. She's sort of gone bonkers. I had a little tweet this weekend about the guy from Yonkers going bonkers. And that, of course, is Secretary of State Blinken, who was born in Yonkers. And his speech in Helsinki shows that he's gone, literally gone bonkers, saying, ah, the Russians have already suffered a strategic defeat. Man, we got this thing all wrapped up. hello i just don't well i think i do understand and what i'm afraid of judge is that that zaparoja nuclear power plant that's

vulnerable okay and if the ukrainians are backed into a really untenable situation, worse than it is now. We have all kinds of hints that a false flag operation could be mounted. Hints to include people like Yale's Timothy Snyder, who attacked it onto an op-ed in the New York Times. The suggestion that, oh, there may be a false flag. Well, in which direction? The Russians have no incentive to mess with the nuclear power plant. Ukrainians with their back up against the wall might be tempted to do that just to slow down what's happening now in Ukraine. This is a nuclear power plant in Ukraine,

which you're suggesting might be the object of a false flag attack, meaning Ukrainian attack made to look like it was a Russian attack in an effort to slow down the Russian troop movements westward. Yeah, now this would be an extremist, but I think we're getting pretty close to extremist for the fellows or the people in Kiev. And, you know, this unreality from Blinken and from the head of national intelligence and from just everybody about everybody else, although there are glimmers of truth seeping through the Washington Post, for example, that unreality is something that Americans will not be prepared for. And they'll just very easily believe that, you know, Russia was losing and that Russia blew up those cooling ponds that would spread disaster

throughout Ukraine and elsewhere as well. Same mentality that argued that Russia destroyed the Nord Stream pipeline. It's just absurd. You know, we had that clip. I'm going to ask Gary to see if he can find it. Gary, the clip of Secretary of State Blinken in Helsinki last week, if you can come up with it. As I've made clear by virtually every measure, President Putin's invasion of Ukraine has been a strategic failure. Yet while Putin has failed to achieve his aims, he hasn't given up on them. He's convinced that he can simply outlast Ukraine and its supporters, sending more and more Russians to their deaths, inflicting more and more suffering on Ukraine's civilians. He thinks that even if he loses the short game,

he can still win the long game. Putin is wrong about this, too. The United States, together with our allies and partners, is firmly committed to supporting Ukraine's defense today, tomorrow, for as long as it takes. So he either is knowingly lying or delusional. Yeah, it could be about 50% of each. You know, they're all delusional.

Here we have Yosef Barrel, the head foreign policy expert of the EU. He said not too long ago that, you know, it's really interesting because the Russians have this history of being able to come from behind, right? They come from behind and win. Like, oh, there was Napoleon. Oh, there was Hitler. And, you know, we don't want to underestimate Russian strength. But then, of course, the solution is to keep this war going, keep pumping more weapons in there. Hello, that is the law. I mean, that doesn't follow.

That's a bad syllogism. What you do is you find a way to stop the war. The last thing I'll say here is that, you know, there's a human aspect to this God forsaken thing. People care very much about Ukrainians, and I do. I include myself in that number. But nobody cared about the 14,000 or 12,000 at least Russian stock that were being killed in the Russian-speaking part of the Donbass from 2014, the coup in Kiev, until the operation that the Russians started in last year. Nobody cared about that. And that was one major reason I'm coming, doing a lot of research on this. It's one reason why the Russians went in. There was a big uptick in artillery fire.

And I'm going to ask people like Colonel McGregor, that usually presages an offensive. In this case, do you think that was the case? Now, there's lots of evidence that was precisely the case. The uptick was in mid-February last year. The invasion came on the 24th. Did you say that the Ukrainian government killed 14,000 Russian-speaking people in a part of Ukraine that it claims is Ukraine? Killed them? Yeah, these were Ukrainian citizens, but of Russian ethnicity. I said 14,000. The best figures are 12,000 because 2,000 of those 14, to put themselves under this coup regime, and so they resisted. And guess what? Where'd they get all those weapons? You know where they got all those weapons? They got a lot of those weapons from Ukrainian army people of Russian stock who said, I'm not going to fight for this coup regime. Here, take my weapons and

take me. I'll fight back. The Russians, it's pretty much proven now, provided very little in the way of material support or volunteers until the very end when, of course, they invaded. But all I'm saying here is that one should have equal sympathy to the 12,000 people of Russian stock that were being killed while this farce was going on with the Minsk Accords. And Russia was being deceived into thinking people were serious about that for those years between 2014 and 2022. If there is a Ukrainian offensive, would it be aiming at this very same area, sort of a burnt out, burnt over region, the Donbass? Well, the reports today are conflicting. But as I read them, the offensive, such as it is, and it may not be the counter offensive was it was focused on zaborozhye and donetsk so they the border area between those two oblasts or provinces uh they're trying to they may try to break through russian lines there to get to to the sea i don't think they have a

prayer i don't think you have a snowball's chance don't think they have a snowball chance in hell to do that, but they may try to do that. And what's really, really lamentable is you have Solensi saying, you know, we're not ready, really. We need more arms, and people are going to die, but we're going to go ahead anyway. Well, why? Because the collective West says, look, if we're going to get our parliament or our Congress to appropriate still more money for you guys, you got to show some sign of life. OK, that's the only reason Zelensky is doing that. So it's really kind of our fault. Here is President Zelensky. And you tell me if this is believable or not,

saying that they're ready. Now, he says this in Ukrainian. I'm going to speak over him using the English subtitles so that the folks that are experiencing Judging Freedom audio only can follow what's going on. Take a listen, Ray. In my opinion, as of today, we are ready to do it. We would like to have certain things, but we can't wait for months. We strongly believe we will succeed. I don't know how long it will will take just so who's that for is that for joe biden is that for tony blinken that's to explain in as nice a way as he can we're not really ready we need more weapons

they're not really available uh it's the stocks in the west that are running out. It's the ammunition we can't get. We're going to do it anyway just to show there's life in the Ukrainian army. And, you know, what about the Ukrainian soldiers are going to be in a bloodbath? Well, that doesn't seem to matter a hell of a lot to Zelensky. Does American intel inform Ukrainian intel of the nature and extent of Russian defenses? Intel has been so politicized, Judge, that I don't know what intel is telling the Ukrainians. Right. all the ministries in Kiev. But, you know, whether they show photographs about, you know, where Russians are deployed and how easily they can counter offense against the counter offensive,

I just don't know. It's all, you know, part of the policy here. You want these guys to go ahead, no matter how many losses they suffer, just to show that they deserve still more armaments from the West. Aside from testifying before Congress, what role does the Director of National Intelligence play in any of this? I mean, does she supersede the Director of the CIA? Does intel have to be filtered through yet another level of bureaucracy at her office? Yes, the answer is yes, yes. It's an unnecessary level of bureaucracy born of Congress's determination to do something after 9-11. The myth was no one's in control of the intelligence community. No one's in control. Nobody has the authority to bang heads together. Well, that was completely wrong. John Brennan,

the director of central intelligence under that hat, had exactly what he needed to bang heads together. Now, he didn't do that. And I said, well, after the 9-11 report came out, I was scheduled to be interviewed by the BBC. So I went across the street, and I'm getting ready after having read as much as I could. And in comes Senator Slade Gorton. You probably know him, Judge, from the state of Washington. And he sits down next to me. I said, Senator Gordon, maybe you can explain something to me. George Tenet already has the authority, and he didn't use it to bang heads together, get those clowns in the Pentagon to tell the truth about weapons of mass destruction. He has that authority.

Why do you create this new superstructure? And Gordon says to me, Ray, you're telling me the lights are on for God's sake. Of course I know we know that. But we have to appear to be doing something, and that's what we came up with. So you're quite right. Now, does she perform a useful role? Very useful if the role is to cover up. She covered up for the people who hacked into the Senate computers under the direction of

John Brennan. She was Brennan's chosen deputy for a while, right? She goes to the White House and she covers up and she says, well, they didn't do anything wrong. She also covered up, or actually she played a lead role in running the investigation into COVID. Did it come out of a Chinese laboratory? No, it came from a Chinese bat, okay? Well, that was what she was directed to say. She, the Director of National Intelligence, was running it. It's not NIH or anybody else. Why? For political reasons. Now, of course, we know this most likely came out of this lab. It was a lab leak. And we also know that the U.S. had a role in this laboratory. Well, here's President Zelensky. You'll, I think, be

not startled because you probably expect it, but you won't be happy to hear this, referring to President Putin, and again, I will read the subtitles, as a cornered animal. Any of our Western partners, they have to understand what specifically they are afraid to lose. His constant Soviet-style threats about nuclear weapons.

All of these are signs of a weak man. And that's how we have to act. A cornered animal. He is afraid of losing his life. He must be afraid of the strength of the world. Why would he be saying nonsense like that about the rather restrained, patient, methodical

Vladimir Putin? Judge, it's hard to explain what Zelensky says, but in this case, he's right. Putin has said, he said a month before the special military operation, if you want to call it, that NATO has cornered Russia. We, quote, we have no farther back to go. We cannot retreat any farther. And he was referring to what NATO was doing in building up the Ukrainian weaponry and the Ukrainian army, but also those bases in Romania and Poland and maybe in Ukraine that can field intermediate and medium range ballistic missiles. So yeah, yeah,

Putin was feeling cornered. The only problem is that Zelenskyy draws exactly the wrong conclusion, just like Joseph Burrell, and says, therefore, now you don't corner somebody with nuclear weapons. That's been the case since nuclear weapons were invented. What's with these peas? What these people, I'm sorry, but you don't wage war against a nuclear power and expect that nuclear power to give up if its existence, if it's an existential threat that it perceives. And that's precisely what Putin has said he perceives. And I believe he does perceive. It's not very different from the existential threat that John

Kennedy 61 years ago perceived from similar missiles stationed in Cuba with five to seven to nine minutes time from launch to target. But what is to be gained by personal attacks on Putin like that? You don't hear him calling Zelensky a coward or a skunk or a criminal. He doesn't even mention Zelensky in public. Zelensky is trying to blend in with the background, right? You remember just one month after Joe Biden became president, George Stepanopoulos, Jeff Uderman said, now, by the way, Joe, by the way, Mr. President, do you think that Putin's a killer?

And Biden, oh, yeah, yeah, he's a killer. And now he's a thug. Now he's a rascal. You know, it makes no sense at all. If you have any idea of working out some kind of arrangement with this person, why would you call him his names? And I have to lament the fact that, what's his name? Bobby Kennedy Jr., for God's sake, feels it necessary to call Putin a thug. Now, the evidence that Putin is a thug really needs to be looked into. Let's assume he is a thug, he really needs to be looked into. Let's assume he is a thug. My God,

why do you call the leader of the powerful nation of Russia with a nuclear capability a thug before you even get approval as a candidate for presidency? It just doesn't make any sense, but it plays to the American people, I suppose. Yevgeny Prokhozhin the head of the Wagner group claims he captured a Russian commander what does that mean? that the paramilitary

Wagner group arrested a full time army lieutenant colonel in the Russian army not in the Ukrainian army yeah the interrogation revealed that this lieutenant colonel in the Russian army, not in the Ukrainian army. Yeah. The interrogation revealed that this light colonel, this Russian lieutenant colonel, was drunk and he ordered his troops to fire on Prigozhin's troops.

Now, I don't know if that's true or not. Prigozhin has, in my view, political ambitions. He talks about, or people talk about him going over the Rubicon, you know, like Caesar went over the Rubicon. And you know what happened to him. It's really a mystery as to why he's allowed to do all this stuff. But there is a check on him. Kadyrov, the Chechen leader, for example. I think Prigozhin is trying to cash in on the unpleasant things that happened to him

at the hands of the Russian military, and I think there's probably a kernel of truth to that. Here's a rather slick and dramatic and foreboding PR piece that the Ukraine government produced with American money, of course. I don't think these are actors. These are real soldiers. But you'll see the message that the Ukraine government is trying to convey. were you able to see and translate what was on the screen at the end i couldn't see it very well, Judge, no. Okay. Was it in Russian or Ukrainian? It was in Russian, yeah, but I think there was a subliminal message there.

All this is to the mass media. We're losing, but please don't admit it, for God's sake. You're so smart. I thought the shush was don't reveal our plans. Don't let anybody know when we're going to attack and you're basically saying to the Western media, shush. Don't tell anybody the truth. Well, they've been advertising their plans for months now. I mean, it's the most interesting pre-publication counteroffensive that I've ever seen in military history, and I've seen a lot of history. And tomorrow, June 6th, is of course the anniversary of D-Day, which begins the liberation of Europe in 1944. What role, if any, did the Russian military play in D-Day, Ray?

Well, the Russians had already pushed the Germans back. It was just a matter of time before they conquered the Germans. We helped. We helped immensely. We helped through Lend-Lease. Studebaker produced 200,000, I don't know if you were in the Army, two-and-a-half-ton trucks, okay? They could do anything over any terrain. And when I met a Russian general, actually the Soviet general, infantry, 91 years old in Moscow,

six or seven years ago, after I recited a kind of a poem about Russian grief, he came up to me and he said, Studebaker, Studebaker, Studebaker, and then he gave a great big embrace. Now, what was that all about? Studebaker provided the wherewithal through Iran, mind you, to the southern part of the Soviet Union at the time, which allowed people like Bagramov, this general, to move his troops, to haul their artillery, to make sure they could go forward. And they did. Did the U.S. help? Indeed, the U.S. helped. Would the Russians have won anyway? I believe that they probably would have probably taken another year, but they would have ended up on the Atlantic shores and the shores of the Mediterranean. So it was good that we intervened, but it was sort of in a supporting role. And some of my friends know a lot about this,

that more than I do, like Scott Ritter and Larry Wilkerson, on my website is an interesting colloquy where the two of them go at it about who really won the war. Great stuff, Ray. As always, my dear friend, thank you so much for joining us. We'll see you as time warrants, but without fail, every Monday morning. All the best. Thanks very much. More as we get it, my friends.

Judge Napolitano for judging freedom. Thank you.