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March 9, 2025 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
23:10
Ray McGovern : Zelenskyy's Endgame
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Hi, everyone.
Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
Today is Monday, March 10th, 2025.
Still coming to you live from Moscow, my dear friend and our regular Monday morning Eastern Time guest and colleague, Ray McGovern, joins us now.
Ray, it's a pleasure.
Thank you very much for joining us.
I wish that you had been with me, and not only for your companionship and your intellect.
But for your language skills in the past five days that I've been here, I did just finish, as you and I were talking during the break, Larry Johnson finished this as well, a two-hour debriefing with Prime Minister Sergei Lavrov.
I would say 98% of it in English.
There were times when he periodically turned to one of his aides, seated at the table with him, and whispered or mumbled something.
In Russian, an official transcript and an official video of the interview will be posted tomorrow, Russian time, Moscow time, on the official website of the foreign ministry,
but we are certainly free to discuss impressions.
I've been here for five days.
And he said he enjoys watching the program.
He mentioned our friend Jeff Sachs.
So it's a startling thrill for me to hear from the Dean of World Diplomats.
That he watches our podcast, Ray.
And of course, you're a major part of the podcast.
You're on twice a week with Larry.
This is very good news, Judge.
I'm not surprised that Lavrov has a sense of humor.
Think of Tony Blinken trying to tell a little story like that.
You need a sense of humor to do this work.
And that's why Lavrov has been around so long and does this work so well.
So it's quite a compliment that he started out that way and that he said he watches your show.
You know, we would be really good if Rubio watched your show too, maybe.
We could ask Lavrov to ask Rubio to watch your show.
What do you think?
Well, that would be terrific.
We know from little snippets of information that have gotten back to us that somebody in the Trump administration, I don't know if it's the White House, the West Wing, the State Department, somewhere somebody watches the show.
We know that, and it's gratifying.
And hopefully some of our ideas can make their way into the president's head and into the president's policy.
The Russians are, I wouldn't say ecstatic, but I would say optimistic and hopeful at the grand reset.
And they know and want the same thing Donald Trump does, which is not just an end to the war in Ukraine, but a grand reset of the relationship between the United States, Russia, China.
There's more hope now in that direction, Judge, than in decades.
I have to add here that I take great solace in the notion that our administration apparently is reading veteran intelligence professionals for sanity output.
We did five memos for Biden.
He ignored them all.
But there's ample evidence that Tulsi Gabbard and Ratcliffe are in possession of them, and actually may be even being guided by them, as well as by people like Professor Jeffrey Sachs.
And that's such good news.
Just think, Judge, four months ago, you and I, Scott Ritter and others, were deathly afraid to end up in a nuclear war because of what had happened.
Now I think we can breathe a lot easier.
I just wish those young people in Ukraine would stop killing each other, but I think that's coming soon.
This is from Alistair Crook, Ray, and I suspect you agree, but this is really your field, so feel free to speak candidly on it.
Alistair's view is that Trump recognizes that the British security state MI6, unbridled, spying on British citizens and on Americans when they're there.
Prosecutions in British courts for free speech is all part of the big state.
All part of the deep state that he is determined to dismantle.
Do you accept that analogy?
I do, Judge, and not only that.
Trump knows that it was the British that started Russiagate at the behest of John Brennan, for God's sake.
And let's recall that on the 20th of February, during that brouhaha in the Oval Office, Trump went so far as to identify Putin with the ill treatment Trump himself received at the hands of these people that are really Russophobes.
So, what does that mean?
That means that there's ample reason for change here.
And more important, Trump is not afraid of identifying himself with Putin.
And if people call him as saying he's in Putin's pocket, well, that's no longer a viable charge if he can bring peace, at least in Ukraine, on Gaza.
It's a completely different story.
One of the things that Foreign Minister Lavrov was particularly critical of Yeah,
and again...
We need a peacekeeping force is insane.
That is a non-starter with the Russians.
That's clear.
That's not going to happen.
And they have taken Russian top officials now.
They didn't used to do this.
They've been very caustic in referring to Macron, advisedly, as a pretend Napoleon.
Reminding him, don't you remember what happened when Napoleon was around?
How he chased them out of Europe?
So, you know, Judge, you sort of interject here that we also serve Hussein behind, right?
Today, we are expecting a big announcement.
It has to do with Russiagate par excellence, how it got started.
Yes, the Department of Justice and the FBI have to decide.
Whether they'll allow the FBI knuckle-draggers to foot-drag any longer after five, six, seven years of denying, number one, that they had any records on Seth Rich.
And number two, oh, we had so many records, we can't possibly make them available.
The judge, the federal judge in this case, has put today as the deadline for the FBI to comply, finally.
With the demand to release documents and other computer stuff, a Vaughan index is what it's called, of what's in Seth Rich's laptops, personal and workplace.
So now, this will be a litmus test.
And again, this is inside baseball, but Kash Patel, he knows what happened to the Epstein incident.
He knows that the chief...
of the field office in New York deliberately opposed and did not give those documents to Attorney General Bondi.
What's going to happen today?
Is Kash Patel going to acquiesce in more foot dragging?
Smart when he says he will, but I don't know.
Do me a favor and email me or text me.
Yeah, we'll have the announcement today.
And meanwhile, Consortium News has a great piece by Bob Perry, by Joe Lauria.
And I put out a piece that I wrote back in, well, five years ago with necessary background because it's been off the public consciousness deliberately because the media, together with the deep state that is Comey and Brennan and...
And let's see, what else?
Deep State Media and of course the Democratic National Committee has succeeded in suppressing court testimony showing that there is no evidence that the Russians hacked those DNC emails.
I want to talk to you a little bit about intel in Ukraine.
It is not clear to me.
That the president has succeeded in turning off all U.S. intel as it provides information and data to the Ukrainians.
Al Steyer reminds us, Scott Ritter told us this last week, and so did Colonel McGregor, that U.S. intel is absolutely vital for locating Russian troop movements and Russian military gear.
Because the British do not have the satellites or access to the satellites that U.S. Intel has.
So my question to you is, is it a complete shutdown?
Or are they still providing?
Is U.S. Intel still providing information either directly to Ukraine or circuitously through MI6, their British cousins?
It shut down.
Judge, the British and the French can thump their breasts, but they ain't got the goods.
They have no capability.
The big story here, of course, is that when Trump talked to Putin, it is obvious that Putin said, did you know that you are enabling direct attacks on Russia proper?
Did you know that, Mr. President?
And did you know that the Ukrainians couldn't do this crazy thing without you?
Now, knock it off, would you please?
And it was knocked off.
It took a while, a couple of weeks.
They knocked off the delivery of arms aid, and now they've knocked off the intelligence.
The sophisticated intelligence enabled not only the firing of sophisticated missiles, but battleground intelligence as to where Russian units were.
That's over.
And just over the last two days, Kursk...
Where the Ukrainians made their crazy thing into, of course, Russia proper.
They're all surrounded now, the ones that are still alive.
Maybe eight, nine thousand of them.
They're in a cauldron.
It's just so sad.
Will they finally give up or will they fight to the last Ukrainian, as has been the motto for U.S. encouragement to the Ukrainian authorities?
Larry says that some of the people in there Are not Ukrainian soldiers.
They are foreign mercenaries.
And they're being executed.
They're either not wearing uniforms or they're wearing uniforms of the countries to which they don't belong.
And the Russians are executing them.
And it is sad that these people were duped and tricked into thinking this would be a military operation that would turn the tide of the war.
Now it turns out...
To have been an unmitigated disaster.
The loss in Kyrsk alone is 70,000 lives on the Ukrainian side.
I can't say they're all Ukrainians because there are foreigners there.
But that is a little under 10% of the total loss, which is now over 700,000 on the Ukrainian side since the war began two years ago.
Yeah, and Judge, we know that the West, that is the U.S. and the U.K., were involved in the planning.
We're involved all the way through of this Kursk episode.
It was, you know, the big adventure of the U.K. and the U.S. to let this happen.
That's crazy.
That shows that our military and our intelligence services are completely incompetent if they told President Biden, yeah.
Tell Zelensky to do this.
Maybe then Congress will think, oh, they still have some fight left in them and provide more aid, which of course happened.
So cynical.
People are dying by the hundreds every day here, thousands some people say, and it's coming to a head because the best troops that the Ukrainians had, what did they do?
They took them off the front line in Donbass and they put them into Kursk.
Now they've lost so many, and now they're surrounded, and now they have nothing to prevent the Russians from moving forward in a measured way toward the Dnieper River, and as far as more as they decide they want to do, to create a cordon sanitaire between Russian-held territory and Western-held territory,
from which the West will not be able to reach Russian-held territory.
With their sophisticated weapons.
Lavrov said this two years ago.
He said, look, it's a matter of geography.
We're going to move ahead as far as we need to to prevent from being attacked.
I'm going to ask you in a few minutes what you think Zelensky's endgame will be.
But while we're still talking about the American provision and now cutting off, and you've clarified that it's totally cut off.
I want to tell you and your people you're the ally I've been hoping for all my life.
Not one American has died defending Ukraine.
You've taken our weapons and you've kicked their ass.
And I'm very proud to have you as our ally.
So, what do I think?
Complete, utter disaster.
What I saw in the Oval Office was disrespectful, and I don't know if we can ever do business with Zelensky again.
He either needs to resign and send somebody over that we can do business with, or he needs to change.
But you're not helping anybody during these discussions if you do not provide the weapons necessary for Ukraine to defend themselves.
You're not helping end the war if you deny intelligence to Ukraine to defend themselves while the fighting is going on.
I don't know what he's thinking or who he talks to.
But the president has said no more military equipment.
Alistair says it'll take a while for that to have an effect because of what's stockpiled in Ukraine and in Romania.
And you've clarified that the intel has been cut off.
So Ray McGovern, this is an easy one, Ray.
Does Lindsey Graham know what the hell he's talking about?
Judge, people talk about giving hypocrisy a bad name.
Cynicism, a bad name.
You get political hacks like that gentleman, and I use the word charitably, and you've got real problems in Congress.
And it looks like Trump will have the ability to bring people like Lindsey Graham under, within reign, reign them in so that they can't...
I believe that Secretary of State Rubio is in Kyiv today, meeting with his opposite number, a human being whose name I don't know, but with whom the secretary has yet to be in his job as secretary.
Yeah. And, you know, this has gone so fast, Judge, that even you and I are having trouble keeping up.
But it's very enlightening as to how Trump moves.
He's shattered all the images and he's made new news every day.
And if this thing goes ahead and the Russians seem quite willing to play ball here, so long as they're...
Deep objectives are observed, namely this distance that I mentioned, the cordon sanitaire, but also to address their legitimate security concerns that everyone recognizes, the Chinese, the Iranian, everyone recognizes that Russia is entitled not to have NATO in Ukraine.
That's a done deal.
Even Trump has acknowledged that's not going to happen.
No. And that is because Zelensky doesn't have that data either.
He's playing it day to day, Judge.
You know, I'm sure he's got a secure place, some mansion somewhere to go to.
Just like that fellow in Afghanistan did, piling money on the plane and dropping some on the tarmite.
But I don't know what Zelensky is going to do.
He's got a choice.
He's got to play ball with what's happening now with Russia and the U.S. pressuring him.
Or he's going to defer to his neo-Nazi advisors and act like the actor that he is and still play the role of saving Ukraine.
I don't know which way it's going to go, but I'm hopeful that within the next month or so, we'll know what the outcome is likely to be.
Just reported now, literally a minute ago by the BBC, United States Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Elon Musk have clashed with Poland's foreign minister over the use of the tech billionaire Starlink satellite internet system in Ukraine.
Musk said on X that Ukraine's entire front line would collapse if he turned the system off.
Ratoslav Sikorsky, the foreign minister, responded, saying his country paid for its use in Ukraine and a threat to shut it down would result in a search for another network.
Rubio dismissed Minister Sikorsky's claims and told him to be grateful, while Musk, typical for Musk, Called him a small man.
What's your take on this, Ray McGovern?
Well, the worst thing, Judge, is that Sikorsky is not going to want to be called a small man.
He's poisoned.
Before he was even foreign minister, but a high dignitary in Poland, on the day that the Nord Stream pipelines were sabotaged, he sent a message and said, way to go, USA, USA, USA!
And he included a photo of the big bubble that was there where the sabotage happened.
So he's foreign minister, yeah, but he's not long for this world, in my view, if he continues to impede this kind of thing and continues to believe and act like the British and the French are acting like I'm still a big shot.
You know, I'm the foreign minister of Poland.
These guys have had it, and we're going to have to see how the Europeans deal with this once they wake up and say, whoa, we can't act like this for many weeks more because we ain't got the goods to protect Ukraine.
We've got to see what the new realities are and trim our sails accordingly.
Ray McGovern, thank you very much, my dear friend.
Thank you for joining us today.
Thank you for coming at a different hour.
Thank you for accommodating.
My schedule while I'm here in Moscow.
Much appreciated.
Most welcome, Judge, and good luck for the rest of your stay.
Thank you.
Thank you.
We will be back with you with a full schedule, a long and full schedule on Wednesday and Thursday of this week and the roundtable at the end of the day Friday.
Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom.
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