Judging Freedom - Ukraine War, What_s Next_ w_ fmr CIA Phil Giraldi

Episode Date: April 25, 2023

Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Tuesday, April 25th, 2023. It's about 11 o'clock in the morning here on the east coast of the United States. Phil Giraldi joins us now. Phil, always a pleasure. Welcome here. Since last we spoke, NBC News, The New York Times, and some others have been reporting that the documents that Jack Teixeira is accused of having leaked to the public were in fact leaked as far back as February of 22 at the start of the Ukraine war. If this is true, does this reinforce the view held by perhaps you and some of our friends and colleagues that this has been a controlled leak. It was not some 21-year-old fooling around with his buddies in a chat room, but information that was slowly

and deliberately given to him knowing he would misuse it. Well, I think it opens two doors in this situation. The one is that if this was not something that was spoon-fed with the expectation that he would leak it, then this is an egregious example of a lack of security in our government in terms of controlling what they considered to be classified information. So we got that kind of thing to hang on them, wondering how this could have run for more than a year without anyone noticing it, unless it was a controlled leak. And yeah, I'm very suspicious of that.

I don't see at this point very much in a way of evidence because this guy's not being allowed to speak. Odd situation where his lawyer doesn't even, not even hinting at anything that might be in his defense. And I'd like to hear more about, you know, what his motivation was and how this was carried out mechanically. How did they do it? Who gave it to them? And if somebody didn't give it to them, what drove him to do this himself? Does the observation that this is totally off the front pages reinforce the view that the government itself was behind the leak?

Yeah, it does. Though on the other hand, it could be the other theory that this was a total embarrassment for the people who run the security inside our government. And the media might be trying to give the government a freebie on this one, that they want to cover up the failure to identify this guy much earlier. But yes, it could also be the other way, that it suggests that the government had a hand in this and the media is doing a cover-up. So the government has not denied the authenticity or the accuracy of the documents. Secretary of State Blinken has not discussed them publicly. Secretary of State, or Secretary of Defense Austin, has not spoken publicly since he materially misled, lied to the United States Senate Armed Services Committee.

And the press doesn't want to talk about this at all. I'm thinking the government is embarrassed. The government is humiliated. The documents are accurate. They want this stuff to go away and they want to share it and be sent away for 20 years. Yeah, I think that's a good way to read it. This is an embarrassment no matter how you look at it. And we're basically in a situation where the mainstream media will cover up anything that the Biden administration does. We've seen a number of incidents in just the past week where there's been, you know, an IRS whistleblower talking about the seeking to investigate Hunter's taxes, which is being covered up. And there's so many stories coming out now, it's just incredible. But I quite agree. This is the media doing its job,

which is to protect the government, not to find out what the government is doing. Were you surprised at the testimony of former acting CIA director Mike Morrell when he threw Tony Blinken under the bus and basically said, yeah, that letter that I orchestrated my ex-intelligence community buddies to sign in October of 2020, poo-pooing the Hunter Biden laptop was done at the request of Tony Blinken, who was the senior campaign official for Joe Biden at the time? Well, the only thing that surprised me about it was the fact that Morrell had the integrity to actually tell the truth for a change. Morrell has been a running boy for the Democrats for a long time now. He famously wrote

a piece back at the 2016 election, which was in the New York Times. It was entitled something like, I ran the CIA and now I'm supporting Hillary Clinton. I mean, this is where this guy's head is. So I was astonished that he actually told the truth, which in this case, Blinken contacted him and basically told him or asked him to get together at least 50 former colleagues from the intelligence community on this letter saying that all the stuff about the Hunter Biden laptop was a Russian provocation, Russian disinformation. This was a total lie. There was no evidence for any of that. And this thing came out just before the election. So it could have seriously had some impact on the results. Do you think that the

signers of this letter truly believed it or that they were Republicans who hate Trump or Democrats that feared Trump and they did it knowingly for political reasons, irrespective of whether there was any truth in the letter or not? That's an interesting question because the list of these 51 people includes both Democrats and Republicans, five former CIA directors who served under both parties. But the interesting aspect of it is they could not possibly have known that this was a Russian disinformation operation because there is no evidence of that. Nobody has surfaced any evidence that the Russians were doing a disinformation operation to help Donald Trump and to denigrate Hunter Biden. So I don't know what they were thinking. One of the signers was Mike Chertoff. Mike and I

have known each other since we were both young lawyers right out of law school in Newark, New Jersey in the mid-70s. He went on to become a federal judge and secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. He now makes a fortune running these security companies. He's also one of the authors of the patriot act one of the great monstrosities uh in american history why would he sully his reputation by uh getting involved in something like this larry johnson uh put together uh photographs of the people who signed the letter. And some of them have false photographs on them because their entire careers were undercover

and he didn't want to expose them. They signed their names, but not their faces. General, trying to think of the name, ran the CIA and ran the NSA as well. Mike Hayden. Michael Hayden. Right, signed the CIA and ran the NSA as well. Mike Hayden. Michael Hayden. Right, signed the letter. What's with these people that they would do something this political? I'm asking you a lot of questions at once. Are CIA people political people, or are they neutral patriots until after they leave the agency?

They're basically people who want to make a lot of money and have discovered very early on in their careers that by going along with the people who are in charge of doling out money, status, jobs, and this kind of thing are the ones they have to deal with and placate. That's what they learn. And so I'm not surprised at any of this, but I'm just thinking that in this case, probably some of these people that one might wonder about, like Chertoff, probably just hated Trump. That might have been the motivation because there certainly was enough of that going around. President Zelensky released a message over the weekend saying that Ukraine could not begin its renewed counteroffensive until Western nations send more weapons, including military tanks and high mobility rocket artillery. Why would he say that? Why would he make a public announcement like that? Does that type of diplomacy help get him the military equipment he says he needs? Well, that's a good question. In fact, there have been a lot of people asking

why he made a statement like that. There has also been a recent report suggesting that he wanted to get some of these advanced weapons so he could attack Russia directly. Now, that would be suicide for Ukraine. So you have to wonder why that statement came out. I think this is what we're seeing here is a lot of these statements are kind of a poker game where he's he's trying to get more and more out of NATO and out of the United States. And he's playing various tricks, I think, to do that, to set up situations or straw men that even the United States might balk at supporting. The United States, for example, is somewhat nervous about the Ukraine war extending into Russia, because the consequences could, of course, be very grave.

So I think a lot of that. If the United States is worried about the Ukraine war extending into Russia, it should restrain the number three person in the Department of State, Victoria Nuland, who says that Russian personnel, Russian drones, Russian military equipment, Russian facilities in Crimea are legitimate Ukrainian and legitimate American targets. Yeah, well, I have to agree with you. I think Victoria Nuland should have been restrained over 10 years ago. The problem is this. Victoria is a neocon, and she basically believes in the assertion by force by the United States in many global venues is a legitimate right of the United States as granted by the Constitution to the President and Congress. I think this is nonsense. I think if you want World War III, or if you want to destroy the planet, this is a good way to be thinking.

A lot of us believe she was the orchestrator of the coup, so-called color revolution, in the streets of Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities in 2014, where the then popularly elected Ukrainian president, close to President Putin but publicly neutral, was forced from office. When the CIA does something like that, how do they do it? How do they get hundreds of thousands of people demonstrating in the streets? Well, actually, in this case, it wasn't the CIA. It was essentially the State Department and the various agencies that are attached to it. The NED, for example, would be the National Endowment for Democracy, would be one such agency working under the cover of the State Department. But that's a fine point. The United States does a lot of this kind of work using money. You subsidize opposition parties. You subsidize opposition leaders. You hire journalists who will write stories that are negative about the government going on there. Victoria Nuland, insofar as I've noted,

more or less admitted that that's what we were doing. And she also admitted that we had spent $5 billion over the course of a few years to do it. I know she took glee in it, but I didn't know that she had actually admitted it. At the time, I think she was an embassy official. Now, of course, she's number three in the State Department. Switching gears a little bit, over the weekend, former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, so Putin's president for two terms, the Russian constitution prohibits a third term. Medvedev becomes president. He appoints Putin as prime minister. They change the constitution.

Putin's now in his third term after that one term break. So you follow all this math. He's in his fifth term as president. Former President Medvedev is the deputy director of their equivalent of the National Security Council. Here's what he said about Poland. The Poles are once again dreaming of restoring the interstate union with Ukraine and revival of the underdone empire, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth from sea to sea. Having no intellectual powers for creating a viable image of the future and living up to its reputation of a country toppled over into the past, Poland is drawing inspiration from 400-year-old maps when parts of today's Ukraine still belong to it.

Imperial hallucinations are pushing the Polish society into the abyss of severe historical breakage. Emboldened by the current circumstances, Poland has decided that the chance to absorb the remnants of Ukraine is to be taken now or never. This is the same Russian official who said the Russian army might have to move as far west as the Polish border. What is this all about? Well, this is historical realities playing out. As you noted, or he noted, the Polish realm that the Polish leadership is referring back to now was 400 years in the past. And it has not been a reality since that time um this is um i don't know um i i

made my recent trip through eastern europe and uh i i heard a lot of this kind of thing that uh ukraine was going to become a a state that will be gobbled up by its neighbors, and quite rightly so, and the Russians, you know, have to be resisted. It's all like people are dredging into their history books to look for justifications to try to get something out of this. And I don't think they're thinking, I don't believe they're thinking very deeply on this. All this kind of rhetoric is very dangerous, and it pushes the nuclear clock that much closer. Does Poland have its finger on a trigger? Is the Polish leadership champing at the bit to enter the war in Ukraine? I think they are to a certain extent. I don't know to what extent

the United States and maybe Germany are trying to restrain them. I would hope that they are. And of course, Poland is in an alliance, NATO, so it can't really act unilaterally in this sense. But the fact is, this is the language that's coming out. I think there is a reality behind it, and that's very dangerous. So yesterday in New York City at the United Nations, the Security Council, which is currently chaired by Russia, and in this case by the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov himself, convened a meeting and said he wanted to talk about ceasefire and peace in Ukraine. Immediately, immediately, the American UN representative,

the ambassador to UN, sought recognition and jumped down his throat. Staring him in the eye, she said, our hypocritical convener today, it looks right at Foreign Minister Lavrov, invaded its neighbor and struck at the heart of the UN Charter this illegal, unprovoked, and unnecessary war runs directly counter to our most shared principles that a war of aggression and territorial conquest is never, ever acceptable. And then she and her British and Australian colleagues manipulated the conversation so Lavrov couldn't even begin to talk about what kind of terms would be acceptable for a ceasefire. What the hell kind of diplomacy is this? Well, that's zero diplomacy. They also,

they walked out of the meeting too, and were encouraging others to do so. It's, this does not serve our national interest, and it does not serve the interest of Ukraine or Russia or anyone. And I'm just astonished at how, again, we get back to the same kind of page we started on today, which is essentially, I mean, the media has huge responsibility in not reporting these stories in a way that emphasizes just how dangerous they are to the American people and to everybody else. And it's just, it goes on and on and on, and they get a free pass, and they get a free pass no matter what they do. I really wonder if, you know, the editors-in-chief of the Washington Post and New York Times, for example, do they really believe in constant warfare as something that will benefit the United States? I just can't

understand where this is coming from. How has the United States benefited when Israeli troops murder Christians and Muslims in Israel, and there's no diplomatic, military, or political repercussion. Yeah, well, it doesn't benefit at all. The United States is basically seen as an enabler of Israel by most of the world, and that's quite correct. And the fact is the Israelis are, it's just, it's a free fire zone against Palestinians in general, no rule of law. And they have targeted both the Christian and Muslim religions, which some of the,

which many of the Palestinians adhere to. So it's just, it doesn't benefit us in any way. It doesn't benefit the Palestinians. It doesn So it's just, it doesn't benefit us in any way. It doesn't benefit the Palestinians. It doesn't even benefit the Israelis. But it's just this constant willingness to cover up crimes that are committed by people that are either in our government or are allied a disgrace. Is this the result of the CIA and maybe MI6 almost bribing the media, not with cash, but with information and the media printing the intelligence community's version of world events? You and I remember when the media used to be adverse to the government, when the media was doing its best to expose the government, to make it transparent.

Today, it's almost as if the media is an arm of the government. And if you accept that premise, is this because of the intelligence community? Well, I would not put it that narrowly. I would say that this is what you say is very true. The media is essentially a spokesman for government policies all across the board. And this comes certainly to some extent from the intelligence community, but it comes from other players too. defense industries, the Pentagon, State Department plays a big role in terms of contact with actual journalists, probably more so than some of the other agencies. So there's a lot of this going on. And it's just, it has, in a sense, destroyed our democracy. If Joe Biden really wants to keep

talking about democracy, he better look right, you know, behind him. Because what's going on essentially has corrupted our elections, has corrupted our government, and there doesn't seem to be any way out of this. Is there a view in the intelligence community as to whether Evan Gershkabitz, the Wall Street Journal reporter now incarcerated in Moscow on charges of espionage, is more likely than not, or was more likely than not, spying for the United States at the time of his arrest? I have been told by a usually reliable source that he was indeed in close contact with the U.S. Embassy and would go in to the embassy and share information with embassy officers. Now, I don't know if those embassy officers were CIA undercover or whether they were regular State Department, but as I say, that's basically what I've been told.

Whether you want to call that spying or not, the Russians certainly do see it that way. If he did that on a regular basis, the Russians would do see it that way. If he did that on a regular basis, the Russians would have known it, right? Sure. You have to go through Russian security to get inside the embassy. So he would have to produce identity documents and they would, if he was going in there every week, every two weeks, whatever, they would know about it. How difficult would it have been for the Russian, I don't know what you call them, FSB, internal security, intelligence community, whatever, to surveil his mobile device and follow his movements? It would have been very easy.

Surveilling his device alone would enable them to track him. And then, of course, they'd be getting all of his phone calls and that sort of thing. So I think he was probably quite aware of that. And so there were things that he would probably do to avoid falling into that kind of trap. But if he's actually going into the embassy and talking to people, that was for him a risky thing to do. And it's not uncommon for CIA officers to masquerade as embassy officials, just as it's not uncommon for the Russians to do the same here. Yeah, I mean, I did that myself about four times. Okay. It's not the time for confession. But Phil, Giraldo, always a pleasure no matter

what we talk about. Thank you very much for joining us. Thank you for having me on again. Of course. Wow. If you like that, like and subscribe, and of course, more as we get it. Judge Napolitano for judging freedom.