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Jan. 8, 2025 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
24:11
Aaron Maté : The FBI and Russia.
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Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
Today is Wednesday, January 8th, 2025.
Aaron Mate is here.
Aaron, a belated Happy New Year to you.
Thank you very much for all the time and effort and thoughtfulness of research that you brought to us in 2024.
It's deeply appreciated by the audience, my team, and me, and of course I hope we can continue to do so in 2025.
You recently received a response to a two-year-old Freedom of Information Act request that you filed with the FBI, and it has to do with the FBI and Donald Trump and Russia.
And I want to ask you what you learned about that.
But before we get to it, Trump has been saying some unusual, startling, even threatening things two weeks before he becomes president, and I thought we could talk about that.
On Gaza, he has said things like, these are all paraphrases, if the hostages are not returned by Inauguration Day, there'll be hell to pay, as if it isn't hell already.
On Greenland and on Panama, he won't rule out the use of force to expand the United States territory, a la Netanyahu Lake, into those areas.
He's intimated.
He's got his eyes on Canada.
Is this a man of peace that we all thought?
Or is this just thoughtless babble intended to produce some sort of negotiating advantage?
Tough to get inside his mind, but going by the experience of his first term, this is someone who...
Ran for office in 2016, you know, criticizing foreign wars, especially in Libya and Iraq.
And then when he came to office, to his credit, and we have to acknowledge this, he didn't start any new wars, but he came close.
He almost started one with Iran when he assassinated Qasem Soleimani.
He did launch a regime change operation.
He did break the Iran nuclear deal and imposed what he called maximum pressure, which really meant maximum sadism against the people of Iran.
It's not the government that suffers from having sanctions reimposed.
It's the people.
And so Trump was inconsistent.
But look, he also has said sensible things over the years.
And even now, at his recent news conference, he said that Joe Biden blocked a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine.
That's exactly right.
To the extent that Trump's comments reflect a change of policy, that should be welcome because we're talking about a really dangerous and catastrophic proxy conflict between two rival nuclear powers.
So he's obviously very inconsistent.
As you said, when you threaten more hell to pay in Gaza, there already is hell.
Gaza is destroyed.
So if Trump is threatening more carnage, it's not only, I think, just objectionable.
Well, can you imagine American troops fighting side by side with the IDF?
I don't even know if they would want that, both the American troops and the IDF.
Yeah, that's not going to happen.
And again, one of the reasons it won't happen is because Israel doesn't need U.S. forces by its side for its operation in Gaza, which is not a war.
It's just a...
It's a genocide.
It's just wiping out a civilian population and their infrastructure, making it unlivable.
So Israel doesn't need U.S. forces to do that with them.
It's doing that fine with U.S. weapons, which the Biden administration has continued to supply.
Biden administration is going out of office by announcing more weapons for Israel.
$8 billion worth was the most recent figure, and I expect Trump will continue that.
Not in the same comment that he made about Greenland, Panama, and Gaza.
And by the way, when he talked about hostages, he didn't mention the 10,000 Palestinian hostages confined in Israeli prisons without charge or prosecution.
Some of those hostages were born in those prisons.
Do I have that right?
There are pregnant women that have been locked up by Israel.
So yeah, it does make sense that People would be born in captivity.
Palestinians would be born in captivity.
He said in another interview, he is Israel's best friend.
What does that mean?
Is that terrifying?
What could he possibly give Netanyahu that Biden hasn't given him?
First of all, just the fact that this is treated as legitimate...
I mean, that's Trump's best friend when it comes to...
He's bragged about it.
He's bragged about how he moved the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem.
He recognized Israel's theft of the Golan Heights from Syria as a gift to the Adelsons.
Those are his real best friends, not Israel.
If he was a good friend to Israel, he would join the rest of the world in accepting the major Palestinian compromise of a two-state solution and just...
His likely national security advisor...
Who, without an FBI background check or Senate confirmation, will soon have the job and a huge staff and access to national security secrets.
Mike Walls, who's currently a congressman, commented the other day that the Trump administration is interested in, he didn't use the word suppression, but dealing with speech that is critical of Israel and praiseworthy of the Palestinians.
What is the government going to do?
They're checking out to uphold the First Amendment.
Well, that's one of the scary prospects of this Trump administration.
And it's all the more surprising because, you know, if you look at the way social media has been censored, if you look at the targets of sort of this shift in recent years of basically weaponizing the government, people like Trump have been the target of it.
You know, basically him being framed as a Russian agent by the FBI, the Hunter Biden laptop story being censored on social media on the fake grounds that it was a Russian operation.
That was targeted against Trump and his team.
But yet Trump and his team feel comfortable using these same overreaches to go after people who support Palestinian rights.
It's one of these things where Democrats are so bad that they created a huge opening for Trump to exploit as being a champion of free speech.
But rather than take that opportunity seriously, you know, Republicans want to use those same tools, those same acts of repression against supporters of Palestinian rights.
And that just reflects the bipartisan commitment to crushing dissent if it goes against Israel.
It's as if the same mentality will occupy the West Wing as is about to leave it, except they have an R after their names instead of a D. When I read what Mike Walls said, it made my stomach cringe.
You know, I don't need to give a lesson on the First Amendment, but the whole purpose of the First Amendment is to prevent the government from evaluating and responding to the content of people's speech.
It's none of the government's business.
You recently received the response to a two-year-old, correct me if I'm wrong, Freedom of Information Act request to the FBI.
What were you looking for and what did you get?
So I filed this Freedom of Information Act request in August 2022, and I got an answer back on New Year's Eve, so more than two years later.
And what I wanted was the FBI's predication for opening up an unprecedented investigation, targeting Donald Trump while he was sitting in the White House as a potential agent of Russia.
This is a widely overlooked case, but it's incredibly important.
And it followed the original Russia investigation.
And that's the investigation that most people know about.
That's Crossfire Hurricane, which was opened up in July 2016 by the FBI, targeting Trump's campaign and going after people like George Papadopoulos and Michael Flynn and Paul Manafort, accusing them of somehow conspiring with Russia.
Now, that case is widely known and it's been discredited.
John Durham did a lengthy investigation.
He found the predication for that investigation to be basically baseless.
If you read the opening FBI document that launched that case, they talk about Papadopoulos having suggested some kind of suggestion that Russia could help Trump without making any reference to the stolen emails that Russia...
I don't think they actually did, but that's a different story.
The vaguest tip possible.
I think that vague predication then was actually just a cover for the fact the FBI was in real life relying on the Steele dossier, but didn't want to admit it.
The Steele dossier being the collection of conspiracy theories paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign in their effort to frame Trump as a Russian asset.
But we know by now that that case has been discredited.
No one takes that seriously anymore.
But amazingly, as that case was already ongoing, after Trump took office, Andrew McCabe, in May 2017, decided, you know what?
It's not enough that we would have one investigation going targeting Trump and his circle for conspiring with Russia.
Let's open up a second investigation, a counterintelligence investigation of the president himself, personally, of being an agent of Russia and also of possibly obstructing the ongoing probe into his campaign's ties to Russia.
And so Andrew McCabe, in May 2017, personally ordered.
We've never gotten an official explanation for why this investigation was launched.
We got the official explanation for why the original Trump-Russia crossfire hurricane investigation was opened, and that was that Papadopoulos tip that was incredibly vague.
We don't know what the predication was for this May 2017 probe, and the takeaway from...
My document that I just got from the FBI is they're still hiding it.
The part of the document that says the factual basis for that probe is completely redacted.
And now we're talking about more than seven years later.
So we still don't know officially from the FBI why they felt they had grounds to investigate the sitting president as a Russian agent.
Do the document...
How many pages did you get?
Are we talking about 10 or 1,000?
Six pages, mostly redacted.
Okay. Do these six pages reflect whether or not they went to judges' research warrants or whether they used authority under the Patriot Act, as crazy as this sounds, to hack into the communications of the President of the United States?
Well, this is the opening document.
So what we can glean from that is that it was launched as a full investigation.
And, I mean, you know better than I. If the FBI launches a full investigation, I assume that then comes with...
Sweeping surveillance powers.
And what we know from the closing document to this probe, because after, of course, this probe turned out absolutely nothing, because it was based on a scam that Trump was a Russian agent, the FBI, in its closing communications, said that they used, quote, a variety of investigative techniques to pursue it.
We don't know what that variety of investigative techniques entailed, but it's not hard to imagine that it involves surveillance of a sitting president.
On the completely baseless grounds that he was a Russian agent.
And Andrew McCabe, in public statements, has said the basis for this probe was that Trump had fired Jim Comey, which led him to believe that Trump was covering something up, because why else would Trump fire Jim Comey, when in real life there was a million reasons to fire Jim Comey.
Comey can be fired at will.
Chris Wray acknowledges that, his successor, which is why he very graciously is about to resign as the head.
That could hardly be considered probable cause or even articulable suspicion to commence a criminal investigation.
Here's the kicker, and I fear that the answer to this is no, and maybe you can dissuade me.
Will what happened to Trump persuade him to dial back the surveillance state In which we now live, by vetoing the extensions of the Patriot Act,
by nullifying Reagan's Executive Order 12333.
I don't know what Reagan intended, but the intelligence community uses it to unleash themselves by stopping the FBI from hacking into people's...
I mean, great question.
And if anybody now has the political capital to, you know, oversee such reforms, it would be Trump.
He was personally the target of a plot abetted by the intelligence community to undermine his presidency.
Who did spy on his campaign.
All the things that he says are true.
And now he's just won the presidency.
He's coming back to office.
And so he does have a mandate here, I think, to roll this back.
He also has a mandate, by the way, to declassify a lot of the documents that the intelligence community has resisted releasing because they're so embarrassing to the Russiagate probe.
But I think if we want transparency and we want to advance, the public has the right to know about all the deceptions that were committed.
In pursuit of Russiagate, including, by the way, this still unproven allegation that Russia hacked the DNC and gave the emails to WikiLeaks, there's a lot of reasons to doubt that allegation, and there's been very little transparency when it comes to it.
The few times we've gotten evidence on that, they undermine the allegation, including, and Ray McGovern's talked to you about this on your show, he's been tireless in exposing this issue, when the president of the firm CrowdStrike, which was, like Christopher Steele, paid for by Hillary Clinton,
Which first lodged the allegation that Russia hacked the DNC.
He admitted under oath to the House Intelligence Committee that actually, yeah, we have no evidence that Russia hacked these documents.
So maybe under Trump now we'll finally get the transparency that has long evaded us.
But back to your original question.
It goes back to what we said before.
Trump talks a big game.
He seems to, in his own personal capacity, have a lot of awareness about how Washington really works.
But when you get into office, it becomes a different story.
You're under a lot of pressure now.
We saw him say a lot of things on the campaign trail in 2016, but then do the opposite when he came into office.
We saw House Speaker Mike Johnson, before he became House Speaker, being a very articulate opponent of government surveillance.
But then what happened when he took over the House Speakership?
He caved, and he basically adopted the positions on surveillance that he previously criticized.
Similar questions hang over Trump.
What will he do when he's actually back in office versus just being a private citizen?
It sounds like he wants to double the size of the United States by using the military to seize real estate, even though Greenland, if you look at the top of it, is so close to Russia.
Hard for me to believe that Putin would roll over over that.
I want to play some clips for you just to raise your blood pressure, but also to get your comments.
These are from...
Secretary Blinken's sort of farewell interviews.
There's a long interview with the New York Times, but we have some short clips.
He repeats again that Putin has failed, but I'd like your thoughts on the context in which he says it.
Chris, cut number two.
Do you feel like you've left Ukraine in the strongest position that you could have, or what are the things that you could have done differently?
Well, first, what we've left is Ukraine.
Which was not self-evident because Putin's ambition was to erase it from the map.
We stopped that.
Putin has failed.
His strategic objective in regaining Ukraine has failed and will not succeed.
Ukraine is standing.
And I believe it also has extraordinary potential not only to survive, but actually to thrive going forward.
And that does depend on decisions that future administrations and many other countries will make.
Earlier in the same interview, he says, we have set up Ukraine for a membership in NATO.
It's almost as if his brain has been missing the past four years.
If I were Ukrainian, I would be so angry at this guy.
Understandably, many Ukrainians are obviously angry at Russia for invading their country.
Fair enough.
But Antony Blinken and his administration...
Set up Ukraine to be destroyed.
They discouraged Zelensky from accepting the Minsk Accords, which could have avoided all of this.
And that was the peace deal reached in 2015 to basically grant some limited autonomy to the Donbass, to the ethnic Russians of the Donbass, to let them speak Russian, have some autonomous rights, and basically respect that Ukraine is a divided country.
So I'm not trying to pull it into NATO or any other camp.
Just recognize that Ukraine is divided.
Then Ukraine could have been in peace.
But the U.S. didn't want that because they wanted to use Ukraine's conflict with Russia to its own advantage as a means to draw Russia in and bleed it.
And that's why after Russia invaded, contrary to Blinken's claims that Russia wanted to erase Ukraine from the map, Ukraine and Russia immediately started negotiating over the same terms, basically, that were there in the Minsk Accords as to how to resolve the The problem in the East,
where you had millions of people revolting against a US-backed government that took power in a coup in 2014.
And again, we know now there was a peace deal.
Donald Trump, as I said, recently acknowledged this too, but the US stood in the way.
And so Blinken, to justify and whitewash all of this, he says that Russia tried to erase Ukraine from the map and that we stopped them from doing that.
But all Russia wanted was basically...
Ukraine committing to neutrality, not joining NATO, and respecting the rights of ethnic Russians in the Donbass.
That was what Russia wanted, and that was basically the basis for the peace deal that the US blocked.
So Blinken is just engaging in outright revisionism.
And what's the result?
Hundreds of thousands of dead.
He says Ukraine is standing when Ukraine's survival was never a threat.
The issue was whether Ukraine would be...
Get to be a whole country or whether Russia, because of Ukraine's refusal to implement the Minsk Accords and then make a peace deal and then implement the peace deal that they negotiated, whether Ukraine would then respect the rights of ethnic Russians.
Because basically Ukraine refused to commit to that, Russia has taken more territory and continues to do that now.
So that's what Blinken is bragging about.
He's presided over hundreds of thousands of deaths and Ukraine losing more territory and standing to lose any more.
Unfortunately, there are many people in the State Department and elite diplomats who agree with Blinken as unrealistic as it is, which leads me to this question.
Do you think a lasting peace between the United States and Russia is feasible?
I think anything is possible.
If you look at Russia's demands shortly before it invaded, they put out this pretty extensive draft treaty between Russia and the U.S. and NATO.
And everybody knows that Russia's demands were not take it or leave it.
They were calling for a negotiation.
And so what they wanted was for...
The most important ask was neutrality for Ukraine, having Ukraine not join NATO.
And they also wanted NATO to roll back its military infrastructure, especially the infrastructure that expanded after 1997.
I think Russia knew it would not get all of its demands, but that's the point of a negotiation, is you make demands and then you sit down and talk.
So there's no reason for me to believe that if a serious good-faith negotiation was undertaken, that some sort of compromise could be reached.
It has to start with, though, neutrality for Ukraine, which, again, is not a radical demand.
It was enshrined in Ukraine, found a declaration of state sovereignty.
Year after year, polls in Ukraine showed that most Ukrainians supported...
If you go back to 2008 when George W. Bush and Dick Cheney pushed through this NATO promise to Ukraine of one day joining NATO, most Ukrainians didn't even want that.
So it's a good starting point to just go with what Ukrainian public opinion has long wanted and what I think is quite reasonable.
And then from there, on the other issues, there could be some sort of accommodation.
So what it would take, though, is courage in Washington and a willingness to...
I don't think we're going to get that with the national security team with which Trump has indicated he plans to surround himself.
Who has long advocated, I think, very sensible positions.
She's very critical of this Cold War with Russia.
And if you listen to Trump, that to me sounds like where his heart is, too.
Whether he has the political fortitude to go through with that, that's another question.
And on that front, I am very skeptical, but you never know.
Certainly, with Biden and Jake Sullivan and anti-blinking out of the way, I do think there's a lot more of a likelihood, as small as that likelihood is.
Aaron Maté, a pleasure, my dear friend.
Thank you very much for your thoughtfulness, for all your help, and we'll look forward to seeing you next week.
Sounds good, Judge.
Thank you.
Okay, thank you.
Coming up at 3 o'clock this afternoon, Phil Giraldi on his encounter with Jimmy Carter and Jeff Sachs, Professor Sachs.
You won't believe who posted one of Professor Sachs' recent...
Dramatic speeches.
Judson Napolitano for Judging Freedom.
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