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April 28, 2025 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
23:58
Ray McGovern : LIVE From Moscow!
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Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
Today is Monday, April 28th, 2025.
Ray McGovern will be here with us in a moment, live from Moscow.
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Ray McGovern, welcome here.
Welcome from Moscow.
Before we get to your trip to Moscow and your perception of the Muscovite view of Donald Trump and Marco Rubio and Steve Witkoff, were you surprised that no representatives of the Israeli government attended the funeral of Pope Francis?
I guess I was a little surprised.
I mean, what are they trying to tell the world that they're really, you know, that they really are exceptional, so to speak?
I don't think it made any good sense, and I think most Israeli diplomats were complaining about it.
So, yeah, it was a mistake, but just the procedural one where it reflects just the kind of hubris, the kind of offensive attitudes that the Israelis have to international fora like that.
Would Mossad have been there?
Or is that a silly question because Mossad is everywhere?
You answered the question, Judge.
Yeah, sure, they would have somebody there.
There was one picture of the president with Zelensky, and I don't know if you saw the ostensible Monsignor behind them, okay?
But that was Tulsi Gabbard, okay?
I'd be the first to know that she was able to overhear what Trump was telling.
I make a joke.
I should make that clear.
No, there is the Monsignor there, but that is not Tulsi Gabbard dressed in Monsignorial garb.
Okay, you're the first to know.
Now look, it looks like Trump is hearing...
Zelensky's confession, Judge.
I don't know.
Maybe there is a chance there will be a detente between the U.S. and...
You know, Trump, as I do, it is dangerous to have him one-on-one because his memory of what was discussed is, I'm sure, will not be consistent with President Zelensky and may not even be consistent with reality.
So...
But it can't hurt to have those kinds of conversations.
How...
Yeah, there's another...
That one really looks like he's going to confession.
We know they're not going to confession.
Neither of them is Catholic, but they happen to be in St. Peter's Basilica.
I mean, this is a photograph that will be viewed for centuries, no matter how the current crises end.
How serious...
Is the push to dump Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense?
And who or what is behind the push?
Just a mystery to me.
I really would prefer not to comment on that.
I haven't been able to keep up on that.
So I'll just say I don't know.
And that will be an honest answer.
Okay.
Does Trump want peace?
I'm sorry?
Peace?
Yeah, he does.
That's the good news, yeah.
I mean, he has chided Vladimir Putin, stop Vladimir, about bombing Kiev.
At the same time, he's bombing civilian targets in Yemen.
Well, you know, Peskov said just, I guess it was today.
Yeah, we heard what the president wrote on Truth Social.
Look, we're doing this secretly.
There's no place for diplomacy being done out in social media.
They take this in stride.
The real deal here, as I've said for a while now, is Whitcoff.
Now, Whitcoff is achieving some success, and there are a lot of people kind of moaning and groaning about that.
It reminds me of when I was at the embassy here in Moscow in 1972.
Why?
Well, because Kissinger was a one-man act.
He would come into Moscow.
He wouldn't even tell Ambassador Jacob Beam.
And on his way out through Helsinki, he'd give them a call, and he'd say, "Oh, by the way, I met with Bershiff and Kosygin, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah."
And then Beam would tell us in the bubble, in the embassy.
And when people would browse about it, he'd say, "Look, look, we just do our job here."
We don't actually know exactly what's happened, but that's okay.
Do your job.
And then I went to the men's room in the political section of the embassy.
And on the back of the wall, there was inscribed, Kissinger was here.
He wasn't there.
That was the point.
He never came into the embassy.
Did this all by himself.
So, Whitcoff is sort of a good example of how you do this by a trusted emissary.
You don't go with the regular channels because this guy has the trust of you and Putin.
And, you know, that's the way it's worked out here.
It might have been better if Mr. Witkoff was with the president and President Zelensky at St. Peter's Basilica for the reasons I articulated.
Here's Foreign Minister Lavrov yesterday on Face the Nation being asked if Russia will continue targeting Kiev, notwithstanding President Trump's statement on truth social.
Chris, cut number seven.
Will Russia continue targeting Kiev despite President Trump saying Vladimir Putin?
You're not listening to me.
We will continue to target the sites used by the military of Ukraine, by some mercenaries from foreign countries.
And by instructors, whom the Europeans officially sent to help target Russian civilian sites.
You know, he was very diplomatic because he knows that some of those mercenaries and some of those instructors are from the United States.
Indeed.
And, you know, Putin made a very big announcement on Saturday saying, look, we're finished in Kursk.
We mocked them all up.
Now we're free to go ahead and give the Ukrainians a real rasgrom, a real defeat along the line that we've been fighting gradually forever.
So that was a very religious announcement.
He had a report from Valery Grasimov, and they were talking about, "Okay, now we're one in Kursk.
Now we're going to turn our attention."
There's no slackening in the pace of the Russian offensive, and I think they're keeping the pressure on.
After all, what better evidence that Putin has the stronger hand here?
And I think this is an incentive for Trump to move quickly and get Zelensky in order or replace him before too much more territory is seized by the Russians.
Effort to repel the Ukrainians from Korsk now successful and complete?
Putin says it is.
I take him at his word.
He also said, or so Gerasimov said, that there are stragglers, there are people trying to put up some resistance, but it's all over.
And there were crack troops, and I think, if memory serves, that Putin said there were 77,000?
Ukrainian troops, most of them highly qualified, put out of action.
That means killed or wounded.
That's big.
These were the best troops they had.
They have nothing left in terms of reserves to protect the rest of Ukraine.
Putin now has free fall to go through all the way to the Dnieper River.
You know, Judge, before we leave Lavrov, I just want to say that I found what he said to Margaret Brennan, in another sense, are most interesting.
What he said when she asked about progress, yeah, there are several signs that we're moving in the right direction.
But first and foremost, says Lavrov, I copied this down, President Trump is probably the only leader on earth to recognize the core interests of Russia in Ukraine when he said, This was a huge mistake by Biden and the others to try to get Ukraine and NATO.
So Trump is probably the only leader on earth.
Yeah, he probably is.
But that's the guy that Putin has to deal with, and they can deal on that basis once Trump understands.
As he said two months ago, I kind of understand where Putin is coming from with this great NATO.
A NATO-armed army on the longest border during that 1,000-kilometer border with Ukraine?
I understand that.
I wouldn't want that either, in so many words.
So I see real progress here, and I feel like this is sort of deja vu for me, because I was here in 1972, and I see this, well, hopefully not as a bookend, but as a bookmarker, okay?
There was detente in the air then.
I'm going to ask you about the air now in just a minute, but here's Lavrov talking about Korsk to Margaret Brennan.
Chris, cut number eight.
If you take a look at the situation in the Korsk region of Russia, for example, there is no single military target for the last six months which the Ukrainians would fire at.
And there was also a proposal by President Trump immediately supported by President Putin to have a one-month moratorium on the attacks on energy infrastructure.
We've never violated this commitment of President Putin.
And Ukrainians violated what Zelensky seemed to support.
Several hundred times.
And I sent to Marco Rubio and to the United Nations the list of those attacks.
It's really very, very telling and eloquent.
There you have it.
There's a new ceasefire, Judge, just announced by Putin himself from the 8th to the 11th of May.
Not in honor of my presence here.
But in honor of the World War II victory in Europe.
So they've invited the Ukrainians to join them, but they're going to have a ceasefire during those celebrations, the 8th, 9th, 10th, and 11th of May.
They've invited the Ukrainians to join them?
You mean join them in the ceasefire, not join them in the celebration?
No, they're welcome to come to celebration, if you like, but the ceasefire is what I'm talking about.
Here's one last, Lavrov, on...
Ceasefire number six.
If you want a ceasefire just to continue supply arms to Ukraine, so what is your purpose?
You know what Kaya Kalas and what's his name, Mark Rutte, said about the ceasefire.
The NATO Secretary General and the European Union.
They bluntly stated that they can support only the deal which at the end of the day will make Ukraine stronger, would
Ukraine a victor.
So if this is the purpose of the ceasefire, I don't think this is what President Trump wants.
This is what Europeans, together with Zelensky, want to make out of President Trump's initiative.
Thank you.
Bye.
Well, how is all this perceived in Moscow to the extent that by your presence there, you have a finger on the pulse?
Well, oddly enough, Judge, this is not the best place from which to judge was
I have a computer with me, and that's been the most help.
We are going to be talking to Russian officials pretty soon.
Tomorrow, Oliver Stone, who invited me to come with him, he and I are going to be speaking to his Naniya Youth Forum, and that will be interesting because this is a very high-level international gathering.
So we'll know more.
We'll have more of a more of a finger Tasting of what the winds are here.
But you could find out, as usual, I hate to admit, from what Lavrov, what Putin, what the others are saying, if you listen carefully, you can see that progress is in the wind.
As long as Trump can face down the resistance and rely on Whitcoff, as Nixon relied on Kissinger, to do the hard work of working out reasonable terms.
I think that's coming.
I think it's coming pretty soon.
They're hoping to get it done this week, says Rubio.
I doubt that's possible, but let's hope.
Yeah, what's your take on Trump?
I mean, does he listen to the people he's been speaking to last?
Did he say nice things about Zelensky because they had a nice private, no media there?
No J.D. Vance there to goad him.
Man-to-man, secret, but we all saw it happening.
Conversation.
And he's impressed by him.
And then he goes home and he finds out the Russians inadvertently killed civilians in Kiev and he blasts them.
I mean, does this change his thinking?
I think Judge Mercurial is probably a better way than unpredictable to ascribe.
To describe Trump, you never know exactly what he's going to say.
What we can say is, in my view, he's not a warmonger, okay?
What he wants to do is a deal.
I take him seriously when he says he wants to stop the killing in Ukraine, and so does Putin.
So there's the makings of a deal right there, so long as Trump realizes there was a terrible mistake to get involved in here.
He's not only saying that, I think he realizes that.
What he needs to do is pretend to get the troglodytes around him, to give him some space and let Whitcoff work this thing out.
I think it's going to be worked out, and I hope it can be done pretty soon, because this...
Coming week, as Rubio has said several times, is crucial.
They're going to move this forward.
And, you know, the Whitcoff meeting there at the end of last week was very successful.
Ushakov and Keskov, they've all said that there was progress and that things are looking up.
And they wouldn't be saying that if there wasn't still hope that a deal could be made on Ukraine.
I'm not mentioning Gaza, but everyone should mention Gaza, because the genocide continues there, and I would not continue there.
I want you to hold off on Gaza for just a minute, because we'll put a bow on the discussion about the Russian-Ukrainian war with a comment Secretary Rubio made yesterday, and then I'm anxious to hear your thoughts about Gaza, and then I want your thoughts about the city of Moscow and see if it's the same as what Larry and I experienced.
But here's Marco Rubio yesterday.
We think we brought the sides closer than they've been in a very long time, but we're not there yet, and it needs to start happening.
I think this is going to be a very critical week.
This week is going to be a really important week in which we have to make a determination about whether this is an endeavor that we want to continue to be involved in or if it's time to sort of focus on some other issues that are equally if not more important in some cases.
But we want to see it happen.
There are reasons to be optimistic.
There are reasons to be realistic, of course, as well.
We're close, but we're not close enough.
Close, but not close enough.
They're still funding the war.
They're still paying for a war without which their funding would end in a month.
Judge, I think that funding was appropriated before Trump came in.
Yeah, but it's all appropriated subject to the president's discretion.
That's the way the legislation reads.
So he could stop it tomorrow.
Yeah.
He's got his own equities in Congress and elsewhere.
I can understand.
It's not for me to condone or think it's a good idea, but I can understand why he's keeping it powder dry.
It is a negotiating tool, and it is necessary to keep some of the real crazies in Congress at bay, in my view.
In the meantime, the slaughter in Gaza continues.
The recrimination between members of The Knesset and Prime Minister Netanyahu continue.
Yair Lapid, who's the leader of the opposition, said, sadly, I expect soon we'll be seeing Jews killing Jews.
Haaretz accused Netanyahu of wanting to form a dictatorship and of lying under oath in an affidavit he submitted to the Israeli Supreme Court.
Where's all that going?
Well, you have the U.S. ambassador to Israel blessing genocide.
I mean, he's a reverend and he's blessing genocide explicitly.
Now, well, if Americans acquiesce in that kind of thing, if we can't stand up and say, look, genocide is evil, we're against it, like the Germans couldn't way back in the 30s, then, you know, what are we worth here?
This is new.
This is something that needs to enter into every conversation.
I'm going to do it here in Moscow as well.
The world has to say no to the rest of the killing there in Gaza and the West Bank.
It's all over the place.
What's your impression of Moscow, Ray?
Oh, my God.
You know, this time I'm getting around and seeing a lot of things, we'll be here for two weeks.
It didn't look anything like this when you were there in the 70s, that's for sure.
Oh my god!
You know, landing at the airport at Lukovo two nights ago, it was really quite stunning, the difference.
53 years is 53 years.
And I tell you, there's a bookmarker here, not hopefully a bookend, but my god, what a difference.
And the people are just thriving here.
You talk about the Russian economy going boom.
Well, not by all appearances here.
And I hope to get out into the provinces as well and see what it's like out there.
So my idea is the sooner that Trump could come here and see what really exists here in Moscow and the rest of Russia.
The better it would be, he would understand that all the stuff that he's been fed, all the stuff that the Americans have been fed forever, is not true.
It's not a gas station posing as a country, okay?
You're not making up that line.
A president of the United States by the name of Barack Obama used that line.
Have you tried your Russian out on any of the locals, and do they respond to you?
Yes, I have.
And I've been very encouraged.
They say that the pronunciation is great if I can find the words.
And do you refer to the president of their country as Putin when you speak to them?
Well, that's what the Russians say, Putin, like Stalin.
And Putin--
Lenin, Stalin, Putin.
Yeah, of course I do.
It shouldn't be a big surprise.
I hope you're having a great time.
You seem happy, relaxed, and youthful.
Please give my regards to your traveling companion, Oliver Stone.
Remind him he's always welcome on this show.
And we'll look forward to seeing you.
Maybe I'll have some stories to tell us with Larry when we do the roundtable at the end of the week.
I dare say, yeah.
One thing that you should know is we're having lunch with Jeffrey Sachs and his wife tonight.
They happen to be in Moscow, and we happen to look into them over breakfast.
And so we're going to have dinner and a nice little chat with them.
So I'll give them your regards.
Please send us a photo, and Chris will post it, and we'll talk about it.
And we're envious that we're not with you.
Thank you, Ray.
All the best.
Okay.
Take care.
See you Friday.
A great man with unbelievable energy.
Coming up at 11.30 this morning, Larry Johnson.
At 2 o 'clock, he was originally at 1, but at 2 o 'clock this afternoon, Kivork Almasian.
And at 3 this afternoon, Scott Ritter.
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