Judging Freedom - U.S. Intel, Ukraine Russia and China - Scott Ritter

Episode Date: April 19, 2023

Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Wednesday, April 19, 2023. It's about 4.30 in the afternoon here on the east coast of the United States. I can see from the comments that many of you have lined up from all over the world. Good morning, Sydney. It's nice that you guys are here and with us. Scott Ritter, of course, joins us today. Scott, always a pleasure. Thank you very much for coming back on the show. I'm still bewildered about a 21-year-old enlisted weekend warrior, and I mean that as no insult to the National Guards, guardsmen and women, having access to the country's most closely guarded secrets.

Are you bewildered by it at all? Shouldn't this be on a need-to-know basis? In the old days, it was. I have to tell you, in the old days, when I came in back in the 1980s, the number of people who had top-secret code word clearances were very small, very select community, and you tended to keep everything within a closed circle. But I noticed at the end of the Cold War, when we were looking at the so-called peace dividend, we got rid of the CIA and the intelligence community

used to have a lot of dedicated analytical support, but it cost a lot of money to sustain it. So they dissolved that. They started farming out analytical support to reserve units, National Guard units. The Marines had a photo interpretation unit that started taking on national tasking. And so this is what would happen.

So the reserve community, the National Guard community, the weekend warriors were getting plugged in. And so they'd be doing their drills on a recurring basis so they could meet certain production requirements. And production means they're going to receive raw data or semi-finished products. And then the reservists will package it, format it, turn it into a briefing slide, and then send it on to the consumer. to the consumer and so this is what was happening so uh and we know this now because the 102nd uh intelligence wing where this guy worked in uh massachusetts has it's been pulled out of this out of the system it's no longer allowed to do this while they're researching uh the um you know how this happened but the point the reality is

there's dozens of other reserve units like this that continue to do this job. And until they figure out how to bring discipline into the reserve community, this is going to be a recurring problem. So what appeared to be a series of documents prepared by the staff of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for distribution to the other chiefs was in fact or in probability, I don't know if we know factually yet, maybe you do, either in fact or more likely than not, prepared by reservists in Massachusetts working one weekend a month? Right. When I say prepared, again, I'm looking at some of the material that he released. And there appeared to be at one point

in time, a series of paragraphs, highly classified paragraphs that were sent in scrolling format. This appears to be the data sent by another unit that is responsible for preparing this analysis. And then the job of the one and second appeared to be to cut this and put it into the appropriate graphic. And so you'd have the, they have a briefing slide format and then they receive data. They don't do the analysis. They're not. It's almost clerical what they're doing. It is purely clerical. It's almost cutting and pasting, if you will. 100%. There's no analysis taking place at the 102nd wing. It's simply a place that frees up. Because in the old days, people like me used to read all the stuff, write all the stuff,

and then prepare the briefing slide ourself before we go and brief the boss. And it's very timely. If this had been on a need-to-know basis, who would determine if Jack Teixeira had the need-to-know? The 102nd Wing, his employment at the Wing would give him the need-to-know, meaning that he's employed. The Joint Chiefs of Staff have decided that they're going to farm out this production capacity to the reserves. The reserve establishment designates the 102nd Wing as the slide preparation unit. And so when he's hired and given his security clearances, it's done with the knowledge that he's going to be sitting at a workstation doing this task. How intense,

intensive is the scrutiny prior to security clearance for top secret? It used to be extraordinarily difficult to get a top secret clearance. When I applied for my clearance, it took more than a year and a half for them to do what they call the SSBI. It's a single scope background investigation, the very detailed investigation before the military could give you a top secret clearance. Today, because they've expanded the community so much, I mean, I don't think people understand how many intelligence analysts the intelligence community has today. They're everywhere.

They're in Department of Homeland Security. They're everywhere. And each one of them has a top secret code word clearance. They're handing them out like candy. And as a result, when you have that many people, there's going to be systemic failures. Okay. The slide presentation that was on his desktop, had the presentation already been made to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, some of the slides clearly showed XXX dates and places where data was to be filled in. So he's taking a generated product. And so there should be no printing taking place whatsoever. You will do your file. You will send the file to your supervisor who will make notes and send it back to you all on computer before being sent out. The fact that

he's printing this stuff out is problematic. All right. So some of the things that he printed out made it crystal clear that senior personnel in the Pentagon were of the view that Ukraine is getting beaten badly and that its air defenses were substantially degraded and might very well, if there's no change in the trend, be completely degraded by the end of next month, late May or early June. Is it fair to say that the Secretary of Defense would have known that, whether he saw this slide presentation that Teixeira made or not? First of all, we have to be fair to the Secretary of Defense because we're dealing with a draft product. Understand that in the intelligence business, briefings are made all

the time, but not always given. And that because this is a product that's being put together, it has to go back into the system and there'll be a supervisor within the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who looks at the time available to brief General Miley and his staff and say, we don't have time to do this. So this briefing's done. We're not doing this briefing. We're not doing this briefing. We're only doing this briefing. So just because this airman was processing this data does not necessarily mean that that data was approved by the chain. Because remember, there's going to be a colonel up somewhere, the briefing colonel, who's going to be going through it,

and he's going to be making changes to the slide too. So the data that's on there doesn't mean it's getting briefed to the boss. It still has to go through a variety of quality control channels. Okay. The Washington Post reports that Teixeira had begun circulating these documents to his buddies in December, December of 22. And the feds didn't discover it until late March, early April of 23, just a week or so ago. Is it reasonable to believe that this stuff had been circulated to 20 or 30 young men, none of whom had any security clearance, and the government didn't know about it? Yeah, look, I'm the biggest believer in incompetence you've ever seen in your life,

just because I've seen incompetence throughout. Should the government have known about it? I mean, one of the things about these kinds of clearances is that his online presence should have been vetted, meaning that if he is involved in a Minecraft gaming world, his bosses have to know about this because somebody in the counterintelligence business needs to be doing a constant screening of his online presence to make sure that he's not doing anything wrong, just like they would screen when I was in, you know, go talk to my neighbors, talk to my friends, make sure I'm not getting drunk telling, you know, stories out of school. That should have happened. So the fact that he's in this community and nobody knows about it is a red flag. And now what they're talking about now is,

see, it's one thing to insist that he declare this and subject him on it. That's the conditions to have your security clearance. But you and I don't have security clearances. You and I are allowed to go into online chat rooms or forums or things like that. And it's none of the government's damn business. Correct. I apologize for that. Correct. What appears to be happening right now is that the solution is going to be that they're going to try and, there's Maverick getting upset about it too. The solution is that they're going to try and come in and start monitoring these things. And so it's like overkill. Okay. I want to show you a clip of the Secretary of Defense testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee.

This is circa late March, so two and a half weeks ago. likely than not that the words he's articulating are either lying or substantially misleading because he must have known of the essence of what these documents revealed, which is that Ukraine is getting beaten badly and there's no reason for optimism. This is a little bit more than a minute in length. With regard to your about ukraine having the upper hand that is what you told me yesterday it is now ukrainians have inflicted significant casualties on the russians and they have depleted their uh their inventory of uh armored vehicles in a way that no one would have ever imagined and so now we see russia reaching for t-54s and t-55 tanks because of the level of damage that

Ukrainians have inflicted on them. And we have, in the meantime, been- And reaching for those tanks demonstrates what to you, sir? It demonstrates that their capability is waning. And we've continued to witness them being challenged with artillery munitions and other things, and they're reaching out to Iran, they're reaching out to North Korea. I think, you know, we'll see an increase in the fighting in the spring as conditions for maneuver improve. Do you believe there's a real chance for significant Ukrainian advancements between now and the beginning of winter?

I believe there's a chance, and we're doing everything that we can do to ensure that they have their best opportunity to be successful, Senator. Truthful or not. Well, here's the thing that we don't know. Look, in the lead up to the Iraq war, Douglas Fyfe, an official in the Bush administration, created something called the Office of Special Projects. And its job was to cherry pick intelligence and focus on that and shape a new reality based upon misleading information for political purposes. This is the stuff that Phil Giraldi told the president to disregard. Correct. Well, listening to Lloyd Austin speaking, somebody is pulling an Office of Special Projects on him. I mean, what he says, for instance, about the old T-55 and T-62 tanks is just absurd in the extreme. And he knows it.

He knows that those tanks are being brought in to be dug in and turned into strog points on the second and third lines of defense. This is very important about whether he lied or not. In a minute, we're going to go to another crazy statement by Victoria Nuland. Is it more likely than not that he knew that it is the consensus of the people right below him, the Joint Chiefs themselves, that Ukraine is losing and is not likely to prevail? Yes. I think Lloyd Austin is not an incompetent person, meaning that he is cognizant of the fact that he is misrepresenting information for the purpose of shaping political perception. And that's the only reason why he testified before Congress. He wasn't there to tell the truth. He was there to shape perception. Okay. I don't know if we have

the data on this, but it was sometime in this year, in 2023, Victoria Nuland, the Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs, appears to have revealed top secret information about the whereabouts of Russian troops and armaments, Iranian-made drones in Crimea. This is all part of her effort to argue, I got to say this with a straight face, that the United States should support an invasion of Crimea. I know this is crazy. She can be crazy. But my question to you is going to be, did she reveal top secret information when she made this statement? Watch what she said. There is a drone base in Crimea where the drones that the Iranians have given Russia are being launched from. There are command and control sites in Crimea that are

essential for Russia's hold on all of the territory, including the land bridge. There are mass military installations on Crimea that Russia has turned into essential logistics and back office depots for this war. Those are legitimate targets. Ukraine is hitting them, and we are supporting that. Revealing top secret information for political purposes? Well, I mean, there's no doubt that she's revealing classified information. I also don't believe that Victoria Nuland, I mean, as much as I dislike her policies and things like that, I respect her professionalism, And she didn't get to where she's at by saying things that weren't screened in advance. I think she had permission to say what she said.

I think this was selective declassification of data to create perceptions of Russian malfeasance that was worthy of American military intervention. Okay. So listen to what you've just told us. The Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs selectively cherry picks classified information, gets permission to reveal it in order to create an image of something that's not true. The Secretary of Defense himself, in an effort to get more money appropriated for his former employer, Raytheon, to build equipment, to build hardware for the military, selectively gathers facts from which he can selectively conclude that Ukraine has a chance to prevail or to do well in the spring and in the winter. Material misrepresentations made at the highest levels. 100%. Look, Judge, I am not a fan of leaking classified information. It's a crime. It's a

straight up crime. And people who make a decision to do so should be willing to pay the price. But, and I don't know if this was the intent of this 21-year-old kid, every time classified information is released to the public, we learn that the government lies. That's what we do. So I think we have to just assume, I hope everybody watching understands what we're saying here. Just because the government says something, I think you have to understand that there's a bigger picture behind it. And the truth is probably far different, almost 180 degrees different from the perception that the government is shaping. The government isn't in the business. In my argument and some of the really good people who believe essentially what you said, people who are skeptical of the government, people who believe in the primacy of the individual over the state, people who recognize that our rights come from our humanity, not from the government. People who refer to the government as essentially the negation of liberty have been critical of me. Judge, you're a traitor. You're what the young man revealed was truthful, not cherry picked, and helps the American public decide whether or not the government is worthy of belief.

Yep. Judge, I'm on your side 100%. You know, Dan Ellsberg, who I'm, he's a mentor of mine, a friend of mine, and I just think the world of the man. You know, he set the gold standard for this kind of action. You know, one that says you have to be willing to accept the consequences of your actions as he's walking up the court steps to face trial that could put him in jail forever. Uh, someone said, how do you feel about the potential of going to war? And he said, going to, going to jail.

And he said to go to jail, to, to stop a unjust war. Yeah, I'm willing to do that. Hey, that's what a patriot is. Correct. The judge was a patriot also, because then, of course, when the judge learned that, almost as Ellsberg was saying that, or the night before, the FBI broke into his psychiatrist's office to steal his medical records, and that was it for the government's case. When the judge threw it out in the middle of the jury trial, they didn't even appeal. They knew that they were cooked. They could not live with what the FBI had done. Bradley Manning would be in his sixth year of a 45-year term had Barack Obama, President Obama, not commuted that sentence. And the same

for Edward Snowden, had he not fled to Russia. Julian Assange, unfortunately, is in the clutches of some of the worst people in the world who we call our allies in Great Britain. But these are people willing to take a chance. What's going to become of this young man? I don't know. Do you have any more thoughts before we get into some of the other stuff I want to talk to you about? Do you have any thoughts about whether the young man did this alone or whether he was an unwitting dupe of somebody north of him on the totem pole who gave it to him knowing he was sharing things with his buddies in the chat room. I mean, you know, well, it'll play out. I personally believe that this was a young man who was trying to impress people with his access to information, that he wanted to position himself as a knowledgeable authority.

Again, these are the kind of things that normally would come out in security screening and probably deny him the ability to hold a clearance. But I think he did what he did. I also, I mean, guard at the embassy who fell into a sex trap, a KGB sex trap, ended up letting a KGB colonel wander the halls of the embassy. He was given a very severe sentence, but later on the judge came back and said, this was just a lonely Marine who, he wasn't trying to betray his country. He just did something that lonely men do often. And so they commuted community sense, this kid is not a criminal.

Okay. That's, that's the first thing I want to say. He's not a criminal. He's a kid. He's a kid who did something immature. He shouldn't have done it given the security clearances. But the other thing is the system failed him. The fact that the system allowed him to do what he was doing means that, you know, his, his, his, his, his tendencies that, that, that had they been corrected early on, the first time he hit print, if his staff sergeant come over and said, what the hell are you, excuse my language, what are you doing printing this out? You can't print this out. I'm writing you up. We're going to put you on report. There's going to be remedial training before we allow you back in. That's what leadership, you know, when I was a second lieutenant judge, I left the confidential slide on my desk as I was preparing a brief. I went home

at night in a secure space. It was locked up, but I left the confidential slide on my desk. The counterintelligence people doing their sweep afterwards found it. I got written up and I was standing tall in front of a general who was telling me one more mistake like that. And you are out of the Marine Corps. Now, fortunately, the Marine Corps believed that you allow people to learn from their mistakes, and I learned from my mistake. But my point is, the system took care of me, meaning they found my error, and they corrected me in a way that I never again repeated that error. That's what should happen to this kid early on. He should have been corrected. This has been superb analysis of this, Scott, and we're all deeply grateful for it.

Switching gears, are you surprised that our mutual friend Cy Hirsch has reported that William Burns, the director of CIA, sat down with President Zelensky and said to him, we know your people have stolen $400 million in cash. Here's a list of 35 generals who have helped themselves to all of this. By the way, your name should be on this list as well, Mr. President. Are you surprised that, well, do you put credibility in size reporting? Because the Biden administration has not denied or challenged this. Look, I think I've made it clear that Seymour Hersh and I have a quarter of a century long relationship, a friendly relationship. And every time I go to Washington, D.C., we get together, we talk. I am familiar with how he works. I'm familiar with his integrity.

And if Seymour Hersh puts pen pin the paper and writes up like this, you know he has a source and you also know that he has vetted his source. You know, this is the guy that has reported accurately on so many things, not just My Lai, not just Abu Ghraib, not just Nord Stream, but, you know, look at all of his reporting

in the New York Times, stuff that the US government initially said, no, no, never happened, then had to turn around and say, yeah, it happened sort of exactly the way Cy laid it out. So, yeah, I trust him. I trust him. Does the Biden administration know? Does Jake Sullivan know?

Does Tony Blinken know? Does Lloyd Austin know? Does the president know that Vladimir Zelensky is a crook? Yes, 100%. They know it. And they facilitate it because that's the price of doing business in Ukraine. They know for, that's just why they don't allow, they don't allow an inspector general. This is why they don't allow audits because they know

how bad it is. So they can't even go through the process of pretending because any inspector general came in, he'd go, Hey boss, we're missing, and now they have to shut it down. So they won't even allow these investigations to take place. That's how bad this is. So when Congressman Thomas Massey of Kentucky and Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky simultaneously, Massey in the House, Paul in the Senate, introduced legislation requiring an inspector general on the ground in Ukraine, legislation that would have amended the blank checks that were given to Joe Biden. The Republican and Democratic leadership together would not let either of those proposals come to the floor for a vote. Why? Because they knew if there was an inspector general,

then the American people would say, why are we giving them a hundred billion dollars only to have 70 billion disappear into pockets? That's unacceptable. So they, that, and I'm telling you, all Congress is complicit in this Chuck Schumer,

Mitch McConnell, and everybody, they know the truth. They just are making sure the American people don't know the truth. And yes, I'm saying it. Congress is making sure the American people don't know the truth about Ukraine. And that is the reason that Jack Teixeira will be prosecuted so aggressively, because the truth embarrassed and humiliated the government. Well, the one saving grace for him might be that there's a lot of information that hasn't come out. And if the government chooses to, as they always do, overcharge and come up with multiple counts to intimidate him into making a plea, if he were to take it to trial,

there's some information there the government doesn't want to bring to trial. And so, you know, they may end up reducing some of the charges and some of the penalties on him. And I think if he has a good lawyer, his lawyer will be trying to cop a plea because the U.S. government doesn't want this stuff to come out. So, yeah, but the truth, Judge, you're 100% correct. The truth, they say, will set us free, but we have to have access to the truth. And we live in a time and a place where our government is lying to us on a daily basis, and they hide behind a wall of secrecy, and they make any American patriot who seeks to breach that secrecy and bring the truth to light to show the American people, they make them out to be a traitor. My hat is off to you, Scott, as are the hundreds of thousands watching.

Thank you very much, my dear friend. We'll talk to you again soon. Thank you. How about that? If you like that, like and subscribe. More as we get it. Judge Napolitano for judging freedom.