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May 27, 2025 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
29:15
Ray McGovern : Peace or War in the Future?
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Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
Today is Tuesday, May 27th, 2025.
Ray McGovern will be here with us in just a moment.
But first this.
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Ray McGovern, thank you very much for joining us.
Thanks for accommodating my schedule.
Before we get into the coming bellicosity, you attended a fascinating two-day conference over the weekend at the Robert Treat Hotel in Newark, New Jersey.
I wouldn't normally mention the name of the hotel.
It happens to be the same hotel, the same room in which I took the New Jersey bar exam, took and passed the New Jersey bar exam many, many moons ago.
You were there.
Scott Ritter was there.
The great Jack Matlock was there by remote.
What was the conference about, and what's your feel for the attitude of young people about war and peace?
Well, the Schiller Institute people are trying to reach out to younger people and inspire them to do something about the indignities that are happening in our own country and abroad.
They're having some success, and they're working really hard at it.
So Scott and I gave what might be called motivational speeches, a little bit of history, but then saying, you know, look, there is such a thing as too late.
Get off your couches or get off your desks from behind your desks and do something.
So it was pretty successful, as I could see.
I could only stay the first day, but I understand that they really got going with the young people yesterday on Sunday.
So I applaud them, and it's an uphill battle, but the more people get informed, of course, the more motivated they are to do something.
Is there a growing opposition in the United States to our funding of genocide in Gaza?
Yes, there is.
And as an aside, I brought my kofia with me.
And I wrapped it around me as I spoke, quoting Bishop Desmond Tutu, who famously said, "In times like these, it is not moral to be neutral.
To be neutral is to be on the side of the oppressor." Now, Tutu, decades before, visited Palestine.
And came away and said that he found the apartheid there worse, worse, mind you, than that that existed in South Africa during apartheid's heyday.
So he knew what he was talking about.
And when he talks about, you know, not being able to remain neutral, well, that's why I put on my little kefir without any pretense of being neutral and therefore on the side of the oppressor.
Do you have any hesitation whatsoever about saying free, free Palestine?
Oh, of course not.
I mean, Palestine should be free.
The UN says it should be free.
Everyone who thinks correctly, who thinks that the Palestinians are human beings, that their children and their wives should not be killed.
Everyone believes that Palestine should be free.
Now, whether it's from river to the sea, well, that can be negotiated.
But you have to have honest brokers.
And the U.S. has not been an honest broker.
Here's the U.S.'s partner in the slaughter on whether people can say free, free Palestine and what it means.
Chris, cut number one.
Free Palestine.
This is exactly the same chant we heard on October 7th.
On that day, thousands of terrorists stormed into Israel from Gaza.
They beheaded men, they raped women, they burnt babies alive.
Free Palestine is just today's version of Heil Hitler.
They don't want a Palestinian.
I could never understand how this simple truth evades the leaders of France, Britain, Canada, and others.
They're now proposing To establish a Palestinian state and reward these murders with the ultimate prize.
You won't be surprised to learn that Hamas thanked President Macron and Prime Minister Starmer and Carney for demanding that Israel end its war in Gaza immediately.
Now, these leaders may think that they're advancing peace.
They're not.
So don't give us this talk.
It'll be a peaceful Palestinian state.
It won't be.
It's hard for me to believe.
You said that two days ago.
It's hard for me to believe he's still peddling the absolute, utterly disproven nonsense about what happened on October 7th, burning babies, raping women, and beheading men.
But if you're Steve Wedkoff, how do you negotiate with somebody like that?
You can't.
You've got to pressure him.
You've got to say, look, no more arms, no more support.
The international fora, we're out of here.
We Americans don't abide genocide.
That's all you have to do, and Trump won't do it.
And so we're trying to mobilize people to force them to do it, to force some sense of conscience into the congressmen and senators who are looking the other way while these people are being, well, ethnically cleansed.
Caitlin Johnstone in Australia, writes from Australia, has an incredible piece just yesterday.
I called attention to it in my tweet and on my website.
It talks about it's not Hamas.
It's not Hamas.
This was planned way ahead.
And, you know, beheading babies and raping women, well, they got Biden to repeat that trash.
We know a little bit more about what happened on October 11th and ensuing months.
And that's not to the credit of Israel or Netanyahu, certainly.
He's in danger of being put in jail, okay?
That's what worries me.
What will he do to avoid that?
Would he try to start another war with Iran?
I wouldn't put it past him.
He's really in a lot of danger, aside from the allegations of his personal criminal behavior.
He does not want an investigation of the origins of October 7th.
He will do everything he can unless he can control the investigators to prevent that from happening because he knows that a lot of fingers will be pointing right at him.
Well, he's a pretty slippery guy, and for the nonce, he's been able to prevent that.
Whether he could do that over the longer run, I just don't know.
What worries me is the Samson option.
They've got nuclear weapons.
They've got...
And if he thinks he can mousetrap Trump into supporting him with an attack on Iran, he's going to do it in dire straits.
So that's really, really troublesome because I'm not sure, although I hope this is so, I'm not sure that our military have told Trump that that would be the end of Israel and be the end of U.S. military bases anywhere near Iran.
Of which we know there are many.
Let me switch gears to an announcement that was made over the weekend, which troubled Larry Johnson and you and me.
And that was by Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, who wants to...
She wants to streamline warrantless surveillance.
So that all of the, we don't know, it's 16, 17, or 18 federal surveillance entities, aka domestic spies, can go to one place for all the surveillance they need.
Did we misread her?
I mean, this is something right out of Lindsey Graham or Tom Cotton or Mike Pompeo's book.
Well, there are supposed to be safeguards there, Judge, safeguards that will be abided by.
You're quite right.
This is the worst of the worst.
Now, there are ways to prevent this.
There are ways to do this without violating the Fourth Amendment or FISA or any other law, okay?
Luckily, veteran intelligence professionals for sanity in the person of Kirk Wiebe and Bill Binney, Ed Loomis, Three very high, very senior, two of them former technical directors at the NSA.
All friends of ours.
Right.
Are at work as we speak on a VIPS memorandum, not only to show how dangerous this is to our civil liberties, but to propose constructive ways they can get around us with the same result.
Yeah, they've been doing this for 25 years.
There are ways to do these things.
You don't have to violate the Constitution to do it.
I mean, if I am reading correctly, and I think it was in the Guardian of London, it wasn't on the front page of the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal or the Washington Post.
If I am reading this correctly, the horrors that...
and he knows that.
That's right.
Ed Snowden talked about turnkey tyranny.
Actually, I had dinner with Ed when I was in Moscow a couple weeks ago, and I said, "Ed, do you think it's three-quarters turn now?" He said, "Well, yeah, it's going to be three-quarters." In other words, he called it exactly.
And what happened to him?
He's unable to come home, even though our Congress rewrote the law to avoid some of the indignities that Ed pointed out when he revealed all those secrets.
Now, that was a very patriotic thing to do.
I'll show you a little photo of Ed and me.
It was a wonderful reunion.
I hadn't seen him since we gave him the Sam Adams Award for Integrity way back in October of 2013.
Four of us went to Moscow to do that.
Wow.
The Russian mentality, the Russian history, the Russian determination, that Donald Trump and the folks around him, whether they're neocons or American firsters, don't seem to understand.
It's almost as if they, in deference to their boss, treat the special military operation as if it were a real estate deal.
Rather than an existential protection of the sovereignty of Russia.
Well, Judge, I'm just reaching here for something that our friend Keith Kellogg said over the weekend.
Are you ready for this?
Probably not, but let's hear it.
He says, now, Sun Tzu is a well-regarded Chinese strategist.
500 BC.
He knows his history.
Then he says, it is the, quote, "acme of professionalism," end quote, to use Ukraine to fight Russia because, quote, "that takes a strategic adversary off the table without, quote, using any U.S. troops," end quote.
My God!
Of course, that was the name of the game, okay?
But it's not working, okay?
U.S. troops, not going to go in there.
The Russians are in there.
So the curve is so much in favor of the Russians that people like Kellogg, I think Trump uses them sort of as a foil.
If some of the neocons says they're going soft on Putin, no, no, look, my special representative, Keith Kellogg, he's been really tough.
It's really crazy.
I have a view that...
I think there's a real split in the government, in the administration, Trump, Vance, Whitcoff, and now Rubio, so trimming his sails to be with the main team against Kellogg and all the other neocons who really can't get out of this ideological framework that the Russians are bad, bad, bad, very bad, okay?
And so they can spout out what they want.
It all depends on whether Trump has the strength, has the political capital to prevail.
Now, on the 8th, 9th of May, the Europeans, the Coalition of the Braindead is what I call it, they said, okay, with Rubio and Kellogg sort of supporting them, they said, all right, 30-day unconditional ceasefire.
Or else.
And we'll give you till Monday to do it.
And so what happens?
Putin gets up on Sunday morning at two o 'clock in the morning.
I was in the air coming home from the celebration.
So this press was still there.
He says, "Media, you're still here.
Come in.
I got a treat for you." He said, "We're going to appeal for immediate negotiations with Ukrainians.
We're going to send the delegation to Istanbul on Thursday.
How's that for you?
Put that in your pipe and smoke it." Next day, Trump says, really good idea, okay?
And they go, and they talk.
And there are, for the first time since Istanbul in 2022, real talks.
Now, where does that stand?
Well, they're supposed to each side prepare a memorandum.
We know that the Russians are preparing theirs.
We could write it right now because we know what it looks like.
Will the Ukrainians let themselves be put on the back foot here and let I put the two of them together.
They're incorrigible.
I'm out of here.
I think that's a likely possibility, but I also have some hope that there's enough residual influence that the Americans, not the British, but the Americans have on Zelensky and the people in Kiev, that they will be more sensible rather than be run over by the coming onslaught.
And I agree with most of the people that say the Russians are positioned to do that onslaught in the coming months, and that will be the end of present-day Ukraine.
I mean, if Trump does walk away, I mean, do we stop, does he walk away just from peace negotiations, or do we stop funding, and do we stop intelligence?
Well, Judge, there's no more arms that Trump has approved, in my understanding.
The ones that are still filtering through, authorized by Biden.
I think the arms are not going to be continuing under Trump.
I think that the intelligence sharing, especially given what happened to Putin's helicopter as he was traveling in Kursk just about five, six days ago.
I think that there's a real possibility there that that was kind of a final straw.
Let me give you some speculation.
The helicopter was attacked.
We know that, okay?
Why are the Russians playing it so softly?
My guess is that this was an act of terrorism.
We have relationships with the Russian security services on terrorism.
My notion is that the Russians have collected all the hard evidence, and there's got to be a lot of hard evidence of this thing, presented it to our CIA representative there that deals with Russian security services, and says, look, this is how bad these guys are, okay?
This is how bad they are.
They're trying to assassinate me.
Now, that's days ago.
Trump pretended not to know anything about it.
Yesterday he was asked about it.
I don't buy that.
I think he knows about it.
So what's going to happen?
There's a really good opportunity here for the two, Russia and the US, to say, look, this is beyond the pale.
This is terrorism.
This was the Ukrainians.
And draw the appropriate implications.
Ukraine, you deal now.
We're out of here and no more support.
No more.
No more intelligence support, because there's a chance that the Russians believe that they could not have attacked Putin's helicopter without very sophisticated warning, and that may have come from Western satellite and other collection devices.
That would explain what Trump said on Sunday in Bedminster, New Jersey, where the airport is when he flies to his home in New Jersey.
Actually, it's in Morristown, New Jersey.
He lives in Bedminster.
Yeah, I'll give you an update.
I'm not happy with what Putin's doing.
He's killing a lot of people, and I don't know what the hell happened to Putin.
I've known him a long time, always gotten along with him, but he's sending rockets into cities and killing people, and I don't like it at all, okay?
We're in the middle of talking and he's shooting rockets into Kiev and other cities.
I don't like it at all.
President, what do you want to do about that?
I'm surprised.
I'm very surprised.
We'll see what we're going to do.
What am I going to tell you?
You're the fake news, aren't you?
You're totally fake.
Any other questions?
I don't like what Putin is doing, not even a little bit.
He's killing people.
And something happened to this guy, and I don't like it.
I haven't heard that, but maybe that would be a reason.
I don't know, but I have not heard that.
Isn't it inconceivable that he hadn't heard that?
I wish I could say that.
You know, there's a line in The Princess Bride, "Inconceivable!" Well, nothing is inconceivable with respect to Trump.
He's all over the place.
He's the brand name for Unpredictable.
And who knows?
He's playing golf all weekend.
Maybe nobody told him that this happened.
And what I said just now is very speculative.
I have to say that.
It could explain the delay and all this other stuff.
But what's being prepared now is this major offensive by the people that want to keep the war going, Judge.
David Sanger.
We know that David Sanger is the CIA mouthpiece for the New York Times.
We know his record, okay?
Just to give you a for instance, as we used to say in the Bronx.
I'll give you a for instance.
Here it is.
July 29th, 2002.
U.S. exploring Baghdad strike as Iraq option.
And Sanger says that WMD are in Iraq seven times as flat fact.
Again, July 29th, 2002.
When was that?
Oh, that was right after CIA director George Tenet met with the UK MI6 chief and said, no, we're going to have a war.
Bush has decided to have a war and it will be justified by the conjunction of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction.
Translation, we will say that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction, is likely to give it to terrorism, and the facts and the intelligence will be shaped to fit the policy that we know was briefed to.
The Prime Minister, what's his name?
The fellow who was Prime Minister then, Blair, okay?
Now, that's Sanger's record.
The other thing is we say this, okay?
Now, Russiagate, October, October 7th, 2016.
This came as President Obama persuaded the head of The Department of Homeland Security, Jay Johnson at the time, and James Clapper, the head of national intelligence, to come up with a memo saying, "We know that the Russians hacked the DNC to deprive Hillary of a win." October, a month before November, they're trying to prevent Hillary from winning.
Now, what happened?
The same day, David Sanger.
U.S. says Russia directed hacks to influence the elections.
Now, that was so bad that Jay Johnson, who has a conscience, had to sort of explain later that, you know, we had no reporting from CrowdStrike, the forensics, but Obama said, no, no, we've got to put that thing out right now, October 7th, so I give it a whole month before the election.
Anyhow, I'm saying Sanger is responsible for all this, and this morning, The whole thing is about how Trump is weak-kneed.
He's not holding Putin to account.
There have to be sanctions which don't work.
It's like a rework of what those brain-dead Europeans are saying.
Massive sanctions.
You know, bone-crushing sanctions, and if not, just watch out.
Well, it's crazy.
I think the things are going to go along.
I think this week, and this is a guess, I think this week the Russians are going to present their memorandum to the Ukrainians, and then they'll be in the Ukrainians' field to react.
And I think things will go along pretty well until the Ukrainians show themselves to be incorrigible again.
And then I think Trump will say, okay, now we're really out of here.
We did all we could to foster this conjunction of this feeling of talk.
And, you know, we can't do it.
So, Europeans, you're lucky.
Give it a good try.
We're out of here.
Trump is calling Putin crazy because, in Trump's view, he's attacking civilians intentionally.
We know from the Telegram chat.
That the American Defense Department attacked civilians intentionally in Yemen.
Trump seems to have no remorse about that.
That's true.
And, you know, all this prison about the Russians hitting civilian targets.
Well, the proof is in the pudding.
You know, how many died under this massive attack this morning or last night?
I think 12, 13. Now, that's a lot of people.
I mean, that's people that all have families and everything, but it's not anywhere near the scale what's going on in Gaza or what's going on elsewhere.
So you got to have a little sense of perspective here.
What the Russians, the speed up or the enhancement of the Russian drone and other rocket or missile strikes could be related to this attempt to down.
President Putin's helicopter came sequentially right after that.
So that may be one reason.
Yeah, the Russians angry?
Well, you know, it doesn't matter.
Putin is a cool customer.
Now, Putin is going to say, all right, look, we know that Trump is unpredictable.
We know he has to play to his audience.
If he's going to say, I'm crazy, well, tomorrow he'll say, let's deal.
Putin's playing the longer game.
I have considerable confidence that this is going to turn out all right.
If the Ukrainians show themselves to be really, really unable to deal, then, you know, Putin is placed to go ahead and go further than he really would want.
You know, Medvedev said over the weekend, "Ah, well, we might take almost all of Ukraine." Well, let's bluster.
Putin doesn't want to take all of Ukraine.
My God, that would be a Vietnam form, okay?
What they want is a deal.
Putin has incentive to deal.
So does Trump.
Something can be worked out if Trump can fend off the David Sangers of this world and the, what's his name, Kellogg and all those other neocons.
Ray, thank you very much.
Thanks for your insight in all of this.
I wish that I had been with you at the conference with Ritter over the weekend, but you guys did a terrific job.
We'll see you again Friday with Larry Johnson.
All the best.
Thanks, Judge.
Of course.
And the aforementioned Larry Johnson will be here at 11.30 this morning and at 1.30 this afternoon, Scott Ritter.
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