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May 12, 2025 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
25:26
Ray McGovern : My Week in Moscow.
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Hi, everyone.
Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
Today is Monday, May 12, 2025.
Ray McGovern will be here with us in just a moment on his week in Moscow.
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Welcome here, Ray McGovern.
Welcome back home.
Always a pleasure to have you on the show.
Thank you for all you did to accommodate us when you were in Moscow.
Those shows were highly regarded and viewed by the usual numbers.
Lectured to youth groups.
You hobnobbed with elites.
Were you able to grasp any feeling on the part of Russians towards the United States under Donald Trump?
Well, yes.
And thanks for having me on, Judge.
We had quite a number of conversations, mostly with senior people, some very senior people.
Confidence.
One of puzzlement.
Why does Trump say one thing one time and one thing the next?
Why does Trump still support Netanyahu in his genocide?
But the reception was very favorable.
It helps to be with Oliver Stone, who is a real star among the Soviet citizenry, Russian citizenry, I should say.
As well as the officials.
So we were given entry to very high officials.
We went down to Sochi for three days.
Sochi being perhaps the most well-protected part of Russia, even more well-protected by Moscow since it's self-contained.
I got the idea down there that if Trump were to be invited, just as a sort of a friendly gesture from Putin to Sochi, Trump would see an incredibly modern city of the kind that's best in China or Japan, one that was prepared well for the Winter Olympics back in 2014, just as we mounted the coup in Kyiv.
So it was a really good, a lot of the high-level officials down there I got to shake hands with.
Lots of folks that one up here in the United States would not have a chance to shake with in their entire life.
So that was good.
I asked about the conditions in the countryside.
You ask real people about that, not only interpreters and people who were accompanying us.
And they said that, yeah, sometimes it's an existence, but they don't need a lot of money.
They don't need to let what they have, what they have.
So it looks like the idea that Biden and his retinue had about Russia falling apart was just about 180 degrees away from the situation.
I think it was Biden's mentor, President Obama, who referred to Russia as a gas station with an army or some such.
Denigrating and absurd comment.
Your observations about hustle, bustle, economic activity, cultural activity, physical and architectural beauty mesh precisely with mine and with our friend and colleague Larry Johnson from the week that Larry and I spent there two months ago.
What do you sense of the prospects for The opening of commercial and cultural relations between Russia and the United States.
Is there an optimistic attitude about that, that Donald Trump will come through with the grand reset?
Well, Trump is really interested in this kind of thing.
They know he is.
And so you see that this fellow Kirilov, who is their investment and their economic advisor guru, he's had these conversations with Witkoff.
He's had the conversations with just about everyone representing the United States.
This is big.
Actually, Kirilov came to the United States, spent a couple of days here, and waxed eloquent about the prospects for economic cooperation.
Now, a lot of that is rhetoric.
There isn't too much room for a real close economic cooperation, but it's a sign of the times.
And, you know, when Putin made that speech at Red Square, you know, it's hard not to describe it as gracious.
They talked about the opening of the Second Front of the West as being, you know, just a real help to the eventual win, even though Russian forces or Soviet forces had already had decisive battles.
And he said he welcomes, he extends an invitation for the West to finally come around and realize that we can do things together.
Meanwhile, of course, you have these coalition of the willing types, heads of France, Britain, Germany, and Poland now.
A friend of mine calls them the coalition of the brain dead.
That's better than willing.
You know, here they are coming up with this really big demand, and what Putin does is parry that at two o 'clock in the morning.
He tells the media, or he tells the media, "Hey, since you're still here, since we don't fly out until this morning, come on to this press conference." And then, of course, he makes this overture saying, "Okay, we've never been against talks.
Let..." Let the Ukrainians meet us in Istanbul on Thursday.
How would that be?
Thursday.
So the ball is in their court.
I haven't kept up on what Zelensky has done in the way of response.
Initially, it was cool, but I imagine he'll come around, actually.
We'll see if anything happens in Istanbul.
Just as an aside, I was detained twice at the Russian airport.
You, of course, were traveling with VIPs.
Were you detained at all beyond the normal customs stamping of your passport and basic questions?
No, Judge.
My concern was getting back in.
When I arrived at JFK, So, yeah, I should have taken this precaution.
Remind me, please, this lawyer I have helped me a lot in Washington.
Remind me, please, what I have to say and what I'll have to say if they start looking in my community.
And by the time I got my bags, I was through passport control and into the other stuff.
And so I called her back and said, no, don't worry about it.
It looks like...
Looks like I'm okay.
So that was my concern.
That's odd, isn't it?
I mean, when you think about how times have changed.
Yeah, it is odd.
It is odd.
They always have in these Russian hotels, VIP floor, they always have what the Soviets used to call it.
Usually it was an old babushka, but she was alert as hell.
And if you left your room, she knew exactly who to tell.
This time and earlier when I...
I came with my colleagues to give Ed Snowden an award.
The Di Journe I was concerned about was somebody from the U.S. Embassy who wanted to find out where Ed Snowden was, you know?
So things change.
By the way, I had a wonderful dinner with Ed, and he's thriving.
He has two sons, four and five.
He's got a newly son wife.
His wife, it's a love story.
His wife came and joined, his lover came and joined him.
They're married.
And they're living quietly, but they're having a really good existence.
He'd like to come back, of course, in hopes for a pardon, but it was a wonderful dinner and a real good chance to renew acquaintances.
Oh, good.
He's a great human being and a bona fide American hero, I think, at some point of historic.
Do the Russian people, by and large, still support the special military operation, can you tell?
Or are they losing patience with its duration?
Well, just another word about Ed.
He does want to come back.
He's trying to put the things in motion so that he'll be pardoned.
But he's very active in staying up with things, and he gave us a briefing.
On AI that even I could understand, complicated as it was.
And with Oliver there, there was a comradeship.
Of course, Oliver made a movie, Snowden, so they knew him well.
So it was just a very warm thing.
And now in answer to this question, with respect to what was it, Judge?
I was asking you if you were able to gauge The attitude of the Russian people about the special military operation in Ukraine, do they still support it or are they running out of patience?
They want it to be over, but they want it to be over not at the cost of the blood already spilled by the Russians or the Ukrainians.
They just want it to be over so there's no more war.
Now, they're not willing to settle for anything less than Maximum terms because Russia has won the war.
I mean, it doesn't make any sense.
The good thing here, as I pointed out in my big speech, was that both Putin and other Russian leaders seem convinced that this is the real deal, that Trump is sincere, their word, and in Putin's word, pomoyomu, in my opinion, you know, we can trust him.
Oh, trust!
My God, trust!
Did we trust them in 2008 when they said, no, don't go into Ukraine?
Does Putin still enjoy vast popularity and credibility?
As far as I can see, yes.
But my experience was anecdotal this time.
The polls still show that the people support Putin and his policies.
There are indications, including in Putin's speeches themselves, You stood two people away from one of those people who want him to go faster in Red Square.
In the VIP section, there you were with Dmitry Medvedev, the former president of Russia.
And now I believe the chair or the deputy chair of Russia's National Security Council.
Yeah, that was interesting.
He's saying anything to you?
Hey, Ray.
I want it to go faster.
I want this over with, Ray.
Well, he does, of course.
You know, he's got a personal beef with Obama and Biden and other presidents.
Back in Seoul, Korea, there was a summit, I think it was 2011, and he was overheard on an ABC mic, okay, saying to Obama, "Look, we're really worried about this so-called ABM system that you guys are putting in Eastern Europe.
For God's sake, can you talk to us about that?
Can we talk about it?" And Obama says, oh, well, yes, sure.
Well, give me some space here.
I'm running for re-election.
Right after the election, real deal.
Well, he was re-elected after the election.
Forget about real deal.
It was more poison.
So, you know, here's Medvedev telling Obama at the end, he said, okay, well, I'll tell Vladimir this.
That's really good news.
So he goes back and tells Putin, and Putin says, all right, okay, I'm from Missouri.
Yeah, I doubt that, but we'll see what happens.
Obama gets elected, and another betrayal in the eyes of the Russians.
Right, right.
Alistair Crook was talking this morning about the hatred.
For Russians going back, going way back, but he was talking about the modern iteration of the hatred for Russians from Scoop Jackson, Senator Henry Jackson, and those folks back in the 50s and 60s, and how that has sort of boomeranged against them with something like bricks.
So Alistair says there's a new common mission.
Russian, Chinese, Iranian, which has made them even closer to each other than they were in BRICS.
Do you have any understanding or did you get any feel for that?
Was the president of Iran there on Red Square on Victory Day?
No, I don't think so.
But he was highly representative.
I would say that you have to add North Korea to that mix.
And you've got a very powerful, with BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Unit and ASEAN, you have a switch of Russian attention and stakes toward the east, okay?
And so if you look at this in the perspective of Russian history, this is monumental.
After all, it was Peter the Great, 1700, that decided, look, the West is where we're supposed to go.
We're Europeans.
We're going to beat.
We'll get a little beat.
Let me smash a window to the West, OK?
Shave off your beards and all this kind of stuff.
The West was the way to orient themselves.
And then what happened immediately?
The Swedes and the Lithuanians and the Hanseatic League and the Poles all tried to take a slice of Russia.
And it took until the 16th century before.
The Russians consolidated power.
So they still want to be part of Europe.
And Putin was careful to say that once again in that wonderful and incredible 2:00 AM press conference where he says, look, the Europeans are going to come around.
We just want to make sure that we're open to developing better relations with them, too.
But Alstair is right.
It's not a multipolar world yet.
The West European coalition of the willing or the brain dead, as my friend said, and the US against Russia and the rest of the world, which is, you know, really something how this tectonic shift has happened, mostly because the brain trust around Biden.
I make a joke.
The geniuses around Biden thought that they could drive a wedge between Russia and China.
Then they did, of course, just the opposite.
It's two against one now.
That's big.
You mentioned Putin rejecting a 30-day ceasefire.
Chris, let's run one and two.
Here's President Putin on May 10th, which is Saturday, and then here's President Zelensky.
Despite everything, we propose the Kyiv authorities resume the negotiations they interrupted at the end of 2022 to resume direct negotiations, and I emphasize, without any preconditions.
I will be in Turkey this Thursday, May the 15th, and I expect Putin to come to Turkey as well, personally.
And I hope that this time Putin won't be looking for excuses as to why he can't make it.
We are ready to talk to end this war.
I think it's probably absurd to expect that they would sit down in the same room, just as absurd that a 30-day ceasefire would be the precondition for serious negotiations, as our friend Foreign Minister Levrov.
That's articulated.
Why would we give them 30 days just to regroup and rearm?
That would be absurd.
Your thoughts?
The 30-day proposal is dead in the water.
The attention now is on whether the Ukrainians send the delegation to Istanbul Thursday or soon thereafter.
I don't know if they will.
But if they do, and Zelensky is part of it, well, I don't think the Russians are going to deal with it.
Zelensky is prohibited by parliament, by the Rada in Kyiv, from negotiating with the Russians as long as Putin is in power.
Is Putin going to step down temporarily so the Russians can talk to the Ukrainians?
Okay, these may be niceties.
And if the U.S. and maybe these brain-dead Europeans can lean on Zelensky to the point and say, look, rescind that law, go, see what you can do with the Russians, because otherwise...
You're dead in the water.
We're not going to give any more arms aid.
We're not going to give any more money.
And good luck with those Europeans.
What is your view on the chatter in the press here in the West, saying the West, because I know you just got home, about this dispute between Trump and Netanyahu?
It seems like Trump...
Is personally snubbing Netanyahu by visiting the Middle East and not going to Israel, and he's starting that tomorrow.
Do you get the feeling that Donald J. Trump, the man and the President of the United States, is sick and tired of Benjamin Netanyahu?
I do, and there's lots of evidence to that.
The proof is in the pudding.
Are you going to believe Haaretz?
Or are you going to listen to more sober-minded people who are from Missouri, so to speak?
You need to show them.
You know, I anticipated you might ask me about this, and so I thought about 2001, when Netanyahu was captured unknowingly on film in a household of adulators, and he was beside himself.
He said, "Turn that thing off.
Turn that camera off." And what he said was, look, the main thing we need to do is hit the Arabs really hard.
A total assault.
A woman interrupts.
Wait a minute.
At what point will the whole world say, what are you, occupiers?
Netanyahu.
The world will say nothing.
The world will say, we're defending ourselves.
I'm not afraid of the world, especially now.
And this is the point, Judge.
Especially now.
With America, I know what America is.
America is a thing that can be easily moved, moved in the right direction.
The Americans will not bother us.
Let's suppose they say something to us, to us Israelis, and they say it.
So what?
80% of the American people support us.
It's absurd that we have such great support there.
Well, that's my point here.
It's not 80% anymore.
It's barely 50%.
I don't even know if it's 8%.
Yeah.
So this is the proof in the pudding here.
You know, if Netanyahu was crazy enough to start a war with the expectation that he can mousetrap us into supporting him, I think he's wrong.
He may do it anyway because the alternative would be to go with a kind of release of the prisoners and a real ceasefire.
And end up in jail because then he would lose the support of his right-wing partners in this coalition.
So jail, bridal suite with his wife, or take a chance.
Maybe we can mousetrap the Americans in again.
Look, 80%.
Well, even if it's 40%, I think he would do that wager.
The question is, what happens when he hits Iran and we don't respond?
Trump will be under a lot of pressure to change this policy and be even tougher on negotiations with Iran, which are going rather decently, I would say, at this point.
Ray McGovern, thank you, my dear friend.
Welcome home.
I'm glad you had safe travels.
I'm glad all is well at home.
I'm glad you were able to join us today and look forward to seeing you.
With the youngster Johnson at the end of the week on the intelligence community roundtable.
Thank you.
One other thing I wanted to say about Snowden.
I owed him a pizza.
The last time I saw him, it must have been 2017 or so, he came to my hotel in Moscow and he brought a pizza and that's how we had lunch.
And so this time I was able to reward him with what the British call a proper dinner at the expense of the Oliver Stone and company.
So it was a nice thing to be able to pay back.
When I was in Moscow, I didn't see any pizza joints.
It's not very good.
It's much better in Newark or the Bronx or even here in Raleigh.
But the idea was that, you know, here Ed scooped up the pizza and treated me to lunch and here I had a chance to repay him in a pretty...
pretty imperial way by my standards.
That's wonderful.
He's a great human being.
I would love to be able to interview him.
I am one of his biggest fans.
At one point, as you know, I had talked President Trump in his first term into pardoning Snowden and Assange at the time.
This was two or three days before he was leaving office.
And then our good friends, Bill Barr, the then Attorney General and...
Mike Pompeo talked President Trump out of it.
Well, maybe I can talk him into it again.
Please give it a try.
Yes.
Thank you, Ray.
We'll see you Friday.
All the best.
Thanks.
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