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June 2, 2025 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
22:46
Ray McGovern : Slow Boat to Gaza.
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Hi, everyone.
Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
Today is Monday, June 2nd, 2025.
Ray McGovern is here with us in just a moment on both the surprise attacks in Russia.
And you're ready for this?
The slow boat to Gaza.
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Ray McGovern, welcome here, my dear friend.
Before we get...
It's only about two minutes long.
It's an excellent summary of what happened in Russia, although our friend Alistair Crook says this is grossly exaggerated.
I'll solicit your opinion in a minute.
Chris, cut number one.
Far from Ukraine's borders, an attack of astonishing audacity.
Russian strategic bombers picked off, one by one, by a fleet of drones.
Ukraine calling this Operation Spider's Web, personally overseen by President Zelensky.
One of Kyiv's boldest attacks so far, a reminder, despite Russia's overwhelming strength in numbers, that Ukraine is a resourceful, determined enemy.
Sources say this took a year and a half to prepare.
Dozens of drones smuggled into Russia, stored on wooden pallets, loaded onto trucks, driven to distant airbases and launched remotely.
Swarms of drones picked up on social media from Siberia to the Arctic Circle.
At a petrol station north of Irkutsk, a glimpse of the operation in progress.
With smoke already rising behind, a drone emerges from the truck and heads off to join the attack.
Moments later, another, and gunfire as police officers try to bring it down.
Ukraine claims to have done a staggering $7 billion worth of damage and knocked out a third of the planes Russia uses to deliver cruise missiles.
Yeah.
We know exactly whom we are dealing with.
We will defend ourselves by every means available to us.
Available to Ukraine.
Available to Ukrainians.
Not for a single moment did we want this war.
We offered the Russians a ceasefire.
Earlier, a different kind of wreckage.
This, the Ukrainian city of Zaporizhia, after the country suffered another major drone and missile attack.
Elsewhere, 12 Ukrainian soldiers were killed at a training base, the head of Ukraine's land forces tendering his resignation.
What chance then for another round of peace talks set to take place in Istanbul?
Russian and Ukrainian delegations are expected to be there, but after 24 hours of mayhem, the omens for a breakthrough do not seem good.
So what do you make of an attack of this?
Magnitude.
Do you have any information from any sources about whether the BBC is correct and its $7 billion worth of damages or whether Alistair Crook is more than likely correct and it's just three or four planes?
It's not more than likely correct.
Alistair is right on the ball here.
The BBC is the worst possible source to depend on their quoting Ukrainian figures, the $7 billion included.
Let's be realistic here and say this is a terrific embarrassment to Russia.
My God, look at where those bases are.
Now, many of them were duds and many of them didn't get off, but several very important TU-95s were destroyed.
Three, maybe five.
This could change the war?
No.
But still, it's a major security lapse.
So it just shows the length and breadth of Russia and how it's very difficult to defend against this kind of terrorism, really, is what you have here.
Now, was it conceived to disrupt the Istanbul talks?
Of course it was.
Look at the timing.
It was yesterday, right?
Okay.
Is it going to?
No.
They went.
They're there.
They're talking now as we speak.
They may be finished, but at last look I saw they were talking about their terms.
So this did not stop the negotiations.
It obviously influenced them, but they're there wherever they are and talking to each other.
Yeah, Judge, yesterday afternoon, maybe a little after this, I tweeted and I said, look, Trump, call Putin now.
You've got to talk about this, okay?
Now, I have no idea whether that happened, but I do know that Lavrov called, what's his name?
Rubio.
Right, yeah.
Okay, and he said, "Look, what's going on?" Now, the readout from the U.S. side says, "Well, Rubio kind of apologized for the sabotage of those bridges." But I'm sure that Lavrov said, What else do you know?
What else do you know, Rubio?
Did you know about this?
And if not, why not?
Now, Rubio can easily say, beats the hell out of me.
They never told me nothing.
The next question.
Well, how about the president?
Did he know about this?
I don't know, but it was a year and a half ago planned.
That would have meant Biden and Blinken and Sullivan.
I'm not sure they told them.
Let's hash this out because this is really important.
And we realize that this really puts a real crush on trust that was just beginning to increase because, as everyone knows by now, I hope, who listened to Alistair, his main point, and a really important one, is these planes were out in the open like settling ducks.
Why?
Because of the treaty we have with the Russians, the START treaty, which requires them to be there so that they can be appropriately imaged and can be appropriately determined to be what the START treaty provides, namely with nukes or not nukes and whether they're ready to go or not.
So this is highly embarrassing.
It's not going to help, but the bottom line is the talks are proceeding.
The Ukrainians have a paper now.
There will be an exchange of papers.
So these are pinpricks in one sense, and in another sense, they're highly embarrassing, and they require an explanation.
Will Putin, next time he talks to Trump, say, look, did you know about this?
Trump, you know, what's worse?
That he says he didn't know about it than he did, all right?
He's got no good answer to that.
Isn't it almost inconceivable that the president, that Telsey Gabbard, that John Ratcliffe...
No, it's not inconceivable.
This is the era of Blinken and Sullivan, right?
They planned the destruction of Nord Stream.
Did they tell a lot of people?
I don't think they did.
Did they tell Biden?
Maybe they told him, but maybe it was not really accomplishment at the time.
So Blinken and Sullivan are a couple The CIA takes their orders from Sullivan, the National Security Advisor.
Now, Rubio doesn't know the first thing.
He's the acting National Security Advisor.
Now, he didn't know the first thing about anything in the NSC.
Did they tell him?
Probably not.
Did Trump know?
Well, again, there's no good answer to that.
But he can easily say, OK, I'm firing John Ratcliffe.
Because if he didn't know-- That's bad.
If he didn't know and he didn't tell me, that's worse.
I think that may happen.
Wow.
Is it inconceivable that CIA, MI6, and Mossad were not involved?
No, that's not.
I mean, it is inconceivable that they were not involved.
CIA has its tentacles and all this.
I see MI6 as the main driver here, but you know, they always take the CIA by the shoulder as they did at the very beginning of CIA.
They say, "This is the way you do things.
We're experts at blowing up bridges.
Look at our experience of World War II and look, watch this now.
We can help you construct these trailers and oh, this is going to be great." Well, it's not great.
It's a pinprick in one sense, but it's got the Russians able to say to Trump, "Look." Are you going to rein in these guys?
Can you rein in these guys?
Or we'd have to deal with this stuff all the way through these negotiations.
Why would Mossad be involved?
Well, you know, they have a long-standing relationship with the Ukrainians.
They have their hand in everything.
And I think that there is some reasoning that would suggest that Mossad wants to keep this war going.
They don't want the U.S. to be able to disengage from this war.
So I don't think they're primarily involved.
I think they probably were aware.
But it's MI6, I see, as kind of the inspiration, if that's the right word, and for the practical preparations for this.
They're pretty sophisticated.
Again, they go back a year and a half.
That means that Trump has some measure of, what, plausible denial if he wants to take that argument.
What do you suspect the likely retaliation will be?
Alistair says the Russians are furious.
Could you imagine if this happened here, Ray?
We'd be furious.
Every American would be, except those who wish us ill, would be furious.
Yeah.
Judge, I've said a lot of times that Putin is human, and he may be curious.
That doesn't really matter.
He's cool, calm, and collective.
And he's winning, okay?
He's got the thing won.
He's in no hurry to finish things off.
He does want a negotiated settlement, I believe, because he doesn't want to take over all of Ukraine, okay?
And he sees a unique opportunity, a window of opportunity represented by this fellow Trump, for whatever reason, also wants to deal and get this thing behind him.
So as I've said before, that's the backdrop before all this stuff.
And however embarrassing these strikes were, I don't think that Putin's going to let himself be provoked because they're so patently aimed.
at sabotaging the talks that again have resumed today despite the effects.
Aren't the talks likely to be fruitless and just a waste of time and just for PR?
They're not just for PR.
Are they likely to be fruitless?
Well, if I were a betting man, of course they're likely to be fruitless, but to the degree that anyone has any influence with Zelensky.
And can force him to recognize reality.
Well, what's the reality?
What does he face if there's no give on his side?
Is he going to trust the Europeans to bail him out?
No.
His military intelligence chief said a year ago that come June, like this month, our forces are not going to be able to hold their own.
And, you know, as you probably know, This buffer zone that Putin had advertised is being done, as we speak, up around Kharkov and Sumy.
So there's a Russian infringement more into Ukrainian territory against the chance that, look, we need as much buffer as we can.
We need an agreement because we need to regulate the kind of weaponry that will be available.
Just across the buffer zone.
Reuters just reported, Chris informs me, the talks ended barely an hour after they began, Turkish officials said, a day after the massive Ukrainian drone attack.
So you're right.
The timing is not a coincidence.
Switch gears.
What is the slow boat to Gaza?
What is the history of flotillas attempting to use ships and boats on the Mediterranean to aid the starving people of Gaza?
Well, Judge, after the election in 2007 or 2006, when Hamas won hands down, the Israelis instituted a blockade on Gaza.
An embargo, you can't get in or out of Gaza.
And citizens took up the cudgel there and said, "Look, if governments, if our government, the US government, is too chicken, too yellow to go ahead and supply these things, we will make at least token voyages to Gaza." And so in 2008, it's gone every year since.
There's a nice little And actually, I had the privilege, if that's the current word, to participate, to be on one of these U.S. boats to Gaza in 2011, the year after that big Turkish ship was shot up by Israeli commandos with nine or ten people killed, if memory serves, including an American citizen, and the U.S. did nothing about it.
One little thing about our trip.
In 2011, we refurbished a boat.
We've chartered it, and you're under US law.
Oh, here's Kuhnberg, who's on this latest ship.
And it's a day out from near Malta.
It's probably due around June 8th.
Well, what will happen when they arrive?
The Israelis won't let them land and deliver aid, will they?
The chances are no.
I wanted to mention that June 8th happens to be the anniversary of when the Israelis shot up the USS Liberty in 1967 off Gaza waters, okay, off the Sinai as well.
So, yeah, they'll arrive there.
Now, the practice has been to seize the boat, to destroy the foods or to bring them to Israel and put these people in jail.
That's what they're risking.
Anne Wright, a good friend of mine, is on that boat.
I know a lot of the other people on that boat.
Why are they doing this?
To demonstrate that U.S. citizens are against genocide.
Now, it's going to be really interesting what the Israelis do.
Back to 2011, I was just recalling that I was told by a high source in the National Security Council that President Obama was not going to help us if the Israelis roughed us up.
Matter of fact, quote, "The administration will just as soon see cold corpses coming back in body bags because that will help." Obama's re-election prospects again in 2011.
Now, Craig Murray, former ambassador to Uzbekistan, British ambassador, he's a good friend of mine.
So he said, come on, Ray, for God's sake, that sounds pretty extreme.
So he put his own sources within the...
So he did it.
He did his sources with respect to the State Department.
He got the same answer from Hillary's people.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
They're just as soon to have this happen and there's no provision.
Whether there's any word that Obama actually told Netanyahu that?
No.
But the writing is on the wall.
Now, what did that mean?
Wow.
It meant that either Obama would let us sail and we would shut up the Israelis.
This is July now.
In 2011, or Obama had to do something else.
And so what did he do?
He called the Greeks and he said, "Look, don't let them out of harbor.
Don't let them out of the harbor." He leaned on them.
You need that INF loan, right, to stay alive.
Don't let them out of the harbor.
And so the Greeks, very apologetically, longtime seafaring nation, right, they sent out their little postcard votes and said, "Please, please stop.
We're under instructions." We got almost nine nautical miles, almost out of Piraeus, and finally our captain, after an hour trying to negotiate, saw that they're going to board us, and we turned around.
So that's how the US chickened out then.
At least we weren't destroyed.
But what's going to happen to these people?
I don't know.
Nobody knows about it because the mainstream media has been, you know, understandably for them, derelict in reporting this.
And what happened?
Well, you know, lots of things are happening in Gaza.
And the timing for the Israelis is okay because, well, when they decided to murder Rachel Corey by running her over with a bulldozer and then backing over her to make sure her back was broken, that was just three days before the war against Iraq.
They knew that if the story appeared in American newspaper pages, it would be A17 at the bottom of the little note.
And they probably think the same thing will happen to these people.
These people are serious.
Here's someone who I hope is not serious, Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina.
Here's what he posted.
Now, that's a picture of Greta Thunberg on the boat.
From a United States senator, hope Greta and her friends can swim.
I suppose you can interpret that in a variety of ways.
The least of which is they're going to take a dip into the Mediterranean, the most horrific of which is the Israelis will blow the boat out of the water, courtesy Lindsey Graham.
Yeah, that's how bad it's gotten.
Now, not everybody likes Greta Thunberg, but I admire her greatly.
Look what she's doing.
You don't have to do this kind of thing.
She's a person that wants justice for the environment and justice for the Gazans, and that's why she's on that vote.
That's why Anne Wright and the others are on that vote.
In other words, there are certain Americans that feel real strongly about our country enabling genocide, and they're going to bring some food in there if they can.
If they can't, they hope that Americans realize, "My God." We're starving of people that forced starvation as well as bombing.
We need to stop this.
And it is within our power, we Americans, to the degree we're a democracy.
And we can do that if our consciences are such that they get us off our rear end and into the streets or into the halls of Congress and try to persuade people that this is not America.
We're Americans.
We don't want this in our name.
Ray McGovern, thank you, my dear friend.
Thanks for your analysis on the intelligence implications and the likely politics of the Ukrainian attack.
And thanks for the report on the slow boat to Gaza.
I'm sure you'll keep watching it for us.
Maybe there'll be news by the time we see you next with Larry Johnson on Friday.
Thank you, Ray.
All the best.
You're most welcome.
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