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Jan. 5, 2025 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
24:21
Ray McGovern :
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Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
Today is Monday, January 6th, 2025.
Ray McGovern will be here with us in a minute on the consequences of President Biden listening to the deep state instead of some veteran professionals of the intelligence community whose predictions were right on.
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Grant McGovern, welcome here, my dear friend.
You know, we often use this phrase, the deep state.
How deep is it?
How deep into the government's fabric and the bowels of the government does the deep state...
Could even a Donald Trump or a Tulsi Gabbard or a Kash Patel unearth it?
Well, those folks that you just mentioned have the only prospect of unearthing it.
If it's 10 meters deep, it's about 9 meters deep with corruption.
There are people that know what the score is, and they have been suppressed, not able to get their message up to the president and his chief advisors, Blinken and Sullivan.
So, yeah, unless Trump cleans house, and I mean cleans real house, cleans it thoroughly, it's going to be a struggle for him to get the right story, because those folks are so used to just telling the president.
Yeah, yeah, you're right.
Make them feel good.
Tell them you were winning as the head of the CIA did a year and a half ago.
Yeah, Putin has already lost and his troops have been exposed as ineffective for the whole world to see.
Give me a break.
Biden, for all his inefficiencies and all his other qualities, has been given really bad advice by people who wanted to tell him what he wanted to hear.
It's been a tragedy.
It's not just Biden, I gather, that this has happened to all modern presidents.
Is it cultural?
Is there something about being in the intelligence community that makes you want to anticipate what your bosses want to hear?
And I'm talking about the high-end people that deal with the president.
I'm not talking about what people like you did and Larry Johnson and the others.
Judge, the best way to put this is there was a BC, like before Christ.
It was a BG, before Gates and his benefactor, Bill Casey.
They ruined the place.
They made sure that...
Analysis on Russia was skewed to show that Russia would never, never, ever collapse, that the Communist Party, the Soviet Union, would never give up power without a real bloody fight.
So you get people moved up in the bureaucracy, depending on how much they were able to spout or parrot these words.
So by the time you get to Iraq, it's the same people who are making decisions.
Well, should we tell Cheney what it's really like, or should we just say, yeah, Cheney, yeah.
Oh, there's lots of possible uranium, and there's lots of possible WMD in Iraq.
So it was totally corrupted them.
And not only the CIA, but the military.
The big beef that I have is I was military myself.
And in those days, if you were issued a stupid order, you had a chance to say, well, sir, you know, I don't think that makes sense for the following reasons.
And if you were to all do it anyway, you had a choice between quitting or doing it.
This military says, yes, sir, and so does the CIA.
So the president says, or Jacob Sullivan says, hey, Bill Burns, head of the CIA, we want to blow up that North Stream pipeline.
Can you do it?
Yes, sir, of course we can.
We have thousands of people that can do that.
Okay. Did Bill Burns say, well, is that really smart?
Can you think about what would happen like a couple of years down the road when the Germans realized that we've destroyed their economy?
No, he said, yes, sir, we'll do it.
Another example I have, and this is on the military side, you know, last March, early March, first week, the State of the Union address.
The Gazans are not only freezing to death, they're starving to death.
What does our very astute president do?
He says, I've instructed the military to build a pier, and we're going to unload food there, and we get into Gaza to fix those people.
Well, guess what?
It was a cockamamie idea.
He didn't check with anyone, but when he told Austin, I'm going to build a pier, I'm going to do it quick, well, they did.
Didn't anybody warn him about weather?
And atmospheric and oceanic conditions?
I guess not.
That's what I'm talking about, the timidity.
The order goes out, Austin salutes, and he says, Corps of Engineers, you may have problems with this.
Do it anyway.
And, of course, as you know, the thing all broke apart.
Well, here's the beautiful pier.
I gave that thing to...
Chris, before.
That's for the week that it existed.
And I think we have an after picture of that as well, when it just broke up because of the tides and because of all the other...
It just looks a shambles.
They had to tell what was left to Israel.
Oh, there it is.
Can you see the pieces floating in the water there?
Let's get back to attitude and culture.
Does the deep state...
Well, it has so far.
The question is whether Trump will have learned by the mistakes of what's happened over the last four years and earlier when he was pressured into doing things he really...
It had no reason to do, like leaving the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty, which was in effect for 32 years and ensured the destruction under appropriate inspection by people like Scott Ritter.
So a whole class of intermediate and smaller range nuclear missiles was destroyed, like it was in place.
It was destroyed and the nuclear weapons together with it.
Why was he pressured into that?
I don't know, but it's a really cockamamie idea, and I think that Trump may have learned things.
Now, what makes me think that?
Well, he seems a little freer to criticize what's going on.
What about those longer-range missile strikes into Russia?
He said they're foolish.
What are they trying to do?
What is the objective of all this?
I never would have gone.
It never would have happened.
Trump is free to say, this isn't my war.
This is crazy.
We should not have done this, especially firing long-range missiles into Russia.
We're going to deal on this.
And as you know, I'm an outlier on this, but I think Trump is realistic enough.
To realize that he's had a real deficit going in there because the Russians have already won on the ground in Ukraine.
But there is flexibility, I think, on both sides.
If there's a will, there's a way.
And I think both sides want to end the slaughter in Ukraine and that that probably will be possible if you give it a year to have these negotiations and talks.
After all, no American president has talked to a Russian president for over two and a half years.
General Kellogg, General Keith Kellogg, retired lieutenant general who worked for the Trump White House the first time around, and now the president-elect has indicated that he will engage General Kellogg to be his envoy.
I'm not sure that this is even an official government position, but his envoy to Isn't this insane?
Isn't this blinking on steroids?
It's insane in the substance of it, but it's completely to be expected at this point, Judge.
You state your maximal demands.
The Russians have said in their treaty proposal, all those nations that were joined to NATO after 1990 should get out of NATO.
Now, do they expect that?
Of course not.
So what we're seeing here from Kellogg, who's a functionary, he's going to take his orders from Trump, not Jake Sullivan, okay?
Not Tony Blinken.
And so it all depends on Trump.
And the real factor here is you have to realize that Trump is unpredictable, but he's smart enough to know that he's got a very weak hand on Ukraine.
He's got other fish to fry.
He's a dealer, and I think he has the room to deal with it.
A year ago, you and some of your colleagues, some of whom are regulars on this program, Who are veteran intelligence professionals warned President Biden not to accept the nonsense that Putin has lost and reminded him that his predecessor and mentor,
President Obama, saw the futility in sending military aid to Ukraine.
Did he ever reply to you?
You know, we don't get much in the way of reaction.
We know that often we get some comments indicating some important people have read our material.
But these people don't need anybody.
I mean, they know it all.
They are geniuses.
Talk about Jacob Jeremiah Sullivan.
Okay, well, he's a genius.
Just five days, five days before the attack by Hamas on Israel.
He had this article appear in Foreign Affairs which said, although the Middle East remains beset by perennial challenges, the region is quieter now than it has been for decades.
We have de-escalated crises in Gaza five days before the big crisis started.
So these people think they know what the score is.
They don't.
And they're not entitled to think they know just because they went to fancy schools.
And had a silver spoon in their mouth when they were born.
So if Donald Trump asks for a picture of downtown Tehran and then says, where does the Ayatollah live and where does he work and I see a bridge and a road between, destroy the bridge.
Wouldn't the right response by the Secretary of Defense or to whomever he gave that order be?
Mr. President, you have to consider the natural and probable consequences of that.
There's also a bridge that goes from Manhattan to New Jersey, and there may be some people offended by destroying this bridge in Tehran who'd want to attack that bridge.
Or would the natural response be, yes, sir, when do you want it done?
The latter is what Biden was accustomed to.
Whether people have the guts to speak cold turkey to Trump, Remains to be seen.
Depends on who he appoints.
Now, if he has Tulsi Gabbard in there, if he has Kash Patel, they know where the bodies are buried and they know about the mistakes of the past.
So there's an even chance that they will tell the president what they really think, whether the president will be guided by them or by what he sees as political realities with respect to Ukraine or with respect to Iran especially.
You know, he needs to be told, Mr. President, Iran is no threat to the United States of America or to our allies.
It wants to fix its own country.
It's got 90 million people.
It is not working on a nuclear weapon.
It's only a perceived threat to Israel.
So you want to bomb the hell out of it, you're doing it for Israel.
Just so you know, Mr. President, just so you know.
When President Carter...
It was bloated after Vietnam, and Jimmy Carter wanted his classmate, Admiral Stansfield Turner, who then...
Was Admiral head of the 6th Fleet in the Mediterranean.
I had a chance to ask Admiral Turner in a green room many years ago, how was it?
How did you get picked for being head of the whole intelligence community and making it work to the point where if the FBI didn't share information with you, you would get down to the White House and say,
sorry. J. Edgar Hoover is hiding information from me, Mr. President.
You need to know that because that's Helms you saw right there.
So what I'm just saying, I'm saying here that Stan said, look, Ray, this is a lesson in life.
I was commander of the Sixth Fleet.
I didn't need a new job, but I heard that the president, President Johnson, Carter was going to give me a call.
So you have about 10 minutes before that happens to figure out how to make it better.
He called and he said, would you be my new director of central intelligence over the whole community?
And I said, Mr. President, I am honored that you would ask me to do that.
But I'm a military person and I don't expect, I don't accept responsibility.
Without the appropriate authority to exercise that responsibility.
So, my conception of the intelligence community, it's all fractured and everybody does their own thing.
If you could fix that for me, I'd be delighted to be Head of National Intelligence.
I'm Head of, in those days, Director of Central Intelligence, okay?
Right. Now, Stan told me that five days later, there was an executive order from President-like Jimmy Carter to all the muckety-mucks, FBI director and everybody else saying, look, Stansfield-Turner has accepted to be my community representative.
There he is in his older years.
He's going to reign the committee in, and if I find out that anybody is not cooperating fully with my director of central intelligence, I've told him to tell me immediately, okay?
He said, That's how you make it better.
There were times where J. Edgar Hoover didn't tell me everything, but by and large, I was able to harness them because I wasn't part of the team.
I was an admiral.
I didn't have to get promoted again or sleaze around Congress or defense industries.
That's the way you make it better.
To the degree you recognize that that worked, I'm delighted because a lot of people didn't like what I did.
Especially getting rid of all the supernumeraries that had been recruited to serve in Vietnam.
Now you have John Ratcliffe, the former congressman, the former director of national intelligence, nominated to be the head of CIA.
He's probably not going to reform anything.
He's probably the delight to the deep state, bringing us back to where we started this conversation.
Correct me if I'm wrong, please, Ray.
Well, I can't correct you now, but I'd say reserve judgment.
He was the fellow, after all, who did a very brief stint as Director of National Intelligence, and he said to Trump in those days, Mr. Trump, there's very damaging testimony by the head of CrowdStrike.
There's Ratcliffe there.
By the head of CrowdStrike, which was tasked to look at the DNC computers.
And the head of CrowdStrike testified in December of 2017 that there was no technical evidence that anybody hacked into those DNC emails that were so embarrassing to Hillary Clinton.
Nobody. Not the Russians.
Nobody else.
Nobody hacked in there.
Okay? Now, Mr. President, why don't you get that published?
And Trump said, that's a good idea.
And so the next day, Ratcliffe called the director of national intelligence, published that, no, actually called Adam Schiff, who was head of the House committee, that oversaw that testimony.
He said, Adam, if you don't release that tomorrow, I will.
And so Schiff released it.
That was February 7th, 2020.
The testimony saying that Russiagate, to the degree it relied on these Russiagate intercepts of...
DNC emails was phony to begin with.
Under oath, this guy testified.
Now, that was 2020.
What is it now?
Oh, 2025.
Has that been in the New York Times?
No. We've been in Washington Post?
No. So, if Ratcliffe is a smart enough guy to say, look, Mr. President, you have some strong cards to play here.
The deep state's not going to like this.
They will hate it if that testimony becomes public.
Well, they hated it.
Yeah. Ratcliffe made it become public, but they released it with about 53 other documents and gave the mainstream press an excuse not to let the rest of us know.
So we haven't known for almost five years that the Russian hacking was made up.
It was made up by the deep state.
And can Ratcliffe...
Proceed on that kind of hard footing?
I think he can.
At least we need to give him the benefit of the doubt.
And if he's working together with Tulsi Gabbard, his nominal boss as Director of National Intelligence, I see that there is a possibility of reform.
It'll take a while.
But once the people in the ranks know, oh, we're supposed to be honest now.
Well, they have the expertise.
They have the ability to be just as honest as they have been dishonest.
Telling the President what he wants to hear.
I agree that you said nominal boss, but why did you say it?
Well, because the Director of National Intelligence is simply a construct invented by the 9-11 Commission to show that they were doing something helpful.
The story then was that George Tenet He was not in charge of the whole intelligence community as director of central intelligence, and so no one was in charge.
Well, that was because George Stenet didn't want to be in charge, okay?
He had the ability to do that, but he didn't want to do it.
So that was the wrap on Tenet and the intelligence community.
So they decided to build a superstructure over that and make the director of central intelligence just head of the CIA.
And create a new level.
And now there are several thousand people working there.
And it's, you know, whether they have a reign on what's going on at the 16 or 17 individual agencies, that remains to be seen because there's not much budgetary influence on their budgets.
And, of course, that's the name of the game.
If you don't have budgetary jurisdiction over these places, they can't.
I don't know.
I'm not as optimistic as you.
I am a fan of Tulsi Gabbard, not with respect to her views on Israel.
She, like everybody else, Trump has indicated he's going to nominate or appoint as an ardent Zionist.
But with respect to the role of intelligence in American society, particularly vis-a-vis the Constitution, she's very much in our camp.
We'll see what happens.
Ray, a pleasure, my dear friend.
The Intelligence Community Roundtable last Friday was terrific.
I'm already looking forward to it with you and Larry at the end of this week.
Me too.
Thank you.
All the best.
And the aforesaid Larry, of course, is Larry Johnson.
He'll be here at 11.30 this morning.
At noon, maybe a minute or two after, Scott Ritter.
And at 4.15, Kevin DeMeritt, Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom.
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