All Episodes
Previous Next
June 9, 2025 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
24:39
Ray McGovern : Who Can Save Gaza?
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
Today is Monday, June 9th, 2025.
Ray McGovern will be here with us in just a moment on just what is happening with the Gaza aid ship and what more do we know about the Ukraine drone attacks all over Russia.
But first this.
While the markets are giving us whiplash, have you seen the price of gold?
It's soaring.
In the past 12 months, gold has risen to more than $3,000 an ounce.
The same experts that predicted gold at $3,200 an ounce now predict gold at $4,500 or more in the next year.
What's driving the price higher?
Paper currencies.
All around the world, they are falling in value.
Big money is in panic as falling currencies shrink the value of their paper wealth.
That's why big banks and billionaires are buying gold in record amounts.
As long as paper money keeps falling, they'll keep buying and gold will keep rising.
So do what I did.
Call my friends at Lear Capital.
You'll have a great conversation and they'll send you very helpful information.
Learn how you can store gold in your IRA tax and penalty free or have it sent directly to your doorstep.
There's zero pressure to buy and you have a 100% risk-free purchase guarantee.
It's time to see if gold is right for you.
Call 800-511-4620, 800-511-4620 or go to learjudgenap.com and tell them your friend the judge sent you.
Ray McGovern, a pleasure, my dear friend.
Welcome here, and thank you for accommodating my schedule.
Thank you also for the many emails that you and I have had, the happy experience exchanging the past three or four days.
After a week, what is your take?
What is your analysis on the drone attacks on Russian military and civilian sites?
Who orchestrated it?
What was their purpose?
Did they succeed?
Well, it was a pinprick operation, but it has been overemphasized as an attack on the strategic triad of the Russian military.
You know, literally speaking, it is, but, you know, it takes two to tango.
The Russians have deliberately ignored that aspect of it.
As a matter of fact, they distinguish between the sabotage of those bridges in Bryansk and Kursk and say, ah, sabotage, sabotage, and we have evidence of foreign country involvement.
The inspector general is looking into that, will report directly to Putin, and they'll blame it on the British.
Meanwhile, the Russians have chosen to believe Trump.
When he said, "Peats the hell out of me," I didn't know a thing about it.
Is that plausible?
Of course it's plausible.
I mean, this was prepared 18 months ago.
Do you think Jake Sullivan was very careful to tell Mike Waltz, "Oh, look, this is going on." I don't think so.
So whether or not Putin believes Trump's denials of foreknowledge, the Russians have chosen to play this.
As truth.
And their readout by Ushakov, who's always there, says that Trump again emphasized, again emphasized, that he didn't know anything before this attack.
That's the way they play.
Now, one other thing I'll just add.
There's a poll in Newsweek today, okay?
It's the Levada poll that some have heard about at the end of May.
And it says that the "Glavni vrag", okay, that's the main enemy.
The Russians always use that.
We are the main enemy.
They are our main enemy.
Okay, it's changed now.
The share of respondents to this Levada poll named the U.S. as the most hostile country toward Russia.
It was down to 40%, down from 76% in 2024.
Who's the most hostile?
Ukraine?
UK?
Okay.
Now, here's another thing here.
The Levada Center polling shows that the antipathy toward the U.S. featured in Western media is not shared by most Russians.
This is Newsweek now.
This could be a backdrop to a thawing of ties between the countries since President Donald Trump came into office.
And there have been some things that Trump has done, especially with respect to the bone-crunching sanctions and so forth, that indicate that he's playing this game.
And I've said very tiresomely, I suppose, that the backdrop here is an overweening desire by both leaders of both countries, Trump and Putin, to create a more recent relationship, which Trump was not able to do the first time.
I think he's mad as hell at having been prevented from doing that.
I think he's going to try his best to do that this time.
Whether he succeeds or not is another question.
But that's where we stand, in my view.
What do you think was the MI6 purpose in orchestrating this?
I mean, did they know they might run the risk of awakening a sleeping bear, so to speak?
Or did they really think that this would have some beneficial military purpose to aid Ukraine?
Not any military purpose.
You know, MI6 is an animal unto itself.
They like to blow up things.
They don't care about the consequences.
In my view, their view might have been, well, yeah, there are strategic bombers here, but that's incidental.
They're sitting ducks.
I mean, they're the only sitting ducks we know of.
Let's shoot them up.
So, you know, it would be different if the Russians were making, as I said before, a federal case out of this.
They're not.
Now, it's a surety that Putin raised that when he talked to Trump.
Did you know about this beforehand?
And it's also clear that Trump would have said, oh, no, I didn't know a thing about it.
They never told me anything.
Now, is that true?
I don't know if it's true or not, but there is this thing that is plausible deniability where even if the CIA felt compelled to tell Trump, well, something big is going to happen, they wouldn't tell him the details.
So anyhow, the operative thing is Putin has chosen to believe that.
And they're going back to talks.
And the readout of the bilateral talks on the telephone by Ushakov says, look, we are going ahead with high-level talks at the summit level and all the other.
That's what's different from the previous Biden government.
Tell me about Russian intel.
If Donald Trump says...
Or the U.S. didn't know anything about it.
Can Russian intel advise President Putin whether that is accurate or not?
In other words, does Russian intel know whether or not Trump truly didn't know about this?
I don't think so.
They're really good.
And they have spies in Washington.
But the people they talk to are very unlikely to know exactly what Trump knew.
I imagine that MI6 will be saying to Salmer, "Of course they know, the CIA, they tell the president everything." Well, that's not the case.
I know something about the CIA.
Yeah, let me reduce this.
During the Bay of Pigs operation, when John Kennedy came in as president, guess what?
The operations part of the CIA did not tell the analysis division What was going to happen?
And they didn't even ask for an assessment of, well, is it true that Castro will be deposed, that there'll be a revolution there?
They didn't even ask him.
Now, Arthur Schlesinger was put on this problem by President Kennedy, and he did a big memo, which is available now.
He says, look, the main thing here is that Ray Kline, head of the assessments division, was not told World War I by Alan Dulles and these other guys.
It's quite possible that this kind of thing happens always in the British system, and we know there's lots of precedent for this.
Eisenhower, U-2, did he know that the U-2 was going to fly over Russia just when he had a summit going with Khrushchev?
No, he didn't.
Why was it that the CIA did it?
Well, CIA, like MI6, does its own thing, and unless it's told not to do it, well, yeah, it's all fun and games.
Who's in charge of American foreign policy, Ray McGovern?
I don't know, Judge.
Trump is trying to be in charge.
Now, Putin has said many times that U.S. foreign policy is conditioned mostly on internal domestic politics.
So he knows that, and he knows the constraints that Trump has to labor under.
Despite that, he sees Trump as his last white hope, you know, his last chance.
There's a window of opportunity here.
Before somebody shoots Trump or shoots Putin, let's see if we can have a deal and at least put Ukraine aside because there are bigger fish to fry.
Now, the bigger fish, as I've said several times, is a detente or rapprochement between Russia and the U.S. That's the ideal and that's the overweening desire in that part of both Trump doesn't want to prolong the war.
Neither does Putin.
And between them, with the help of the Chinese and the Iranians and all those kind of people, Trump is falling in with the more logical equities here, saying, look, Ukraine can't survive without our hope, without our help.
I'm not going to give them any more help, even though there's a trickling of military aid going in.
And I'm going to just work this out with Putin.
He's in no hurry.
He's winning.
We'll go back to Istanbul.
We'll talk some more on the technicalities.
Meanwhile, the exchange of prisoners, those young kids kidnapped out of the nightclubs in Kiev are being let go now if they're under 25. The body, 8,000, 8,000 frozen Ukrainian soldiers are being given.
Well, they agreed to give them back.
Apparently the Ukraine don't want them.
My God.
So it's a circus.
These are 8,000 frozen dead bodies.
Yeah, right.
That was part of the agreement in Istanbul.
If this was orchestrated in part by Jake Sullivan and that crew, wouldn't Trump be furious that his people didn't know about it?
He should be, you know.
There are people in the bowels of the CIA that knew.
Now, if John Ratcliffe didn't ferret them out, we'll have somebody who knows which end is up go down into those bowels and say, all right, guys, fess up.
You're going to be fired if you don't fess up because we've got the evidence, whether they have the evidence or not.
Yeah, I think Ratcliffe really is shown to be inept here.
Tulsi Gabbard to a degree as well.
That is, if, as I assume, they did not know, and that's a fair assumption, and in any case, as I keep saying, Putin has chosen to believe that, or at least to believe that overtly, and he's been very careful, again, to disassociate.
the attacks on the airfields from the terrorists, I repeat, terrorist attacks on those bridges that have all the earmarks of British intelligence, the bridges in Bryansk and Kursk, and then another attempt on that big bridge in Kursk, you know, it's going to be a
They may want to get new life insurance.
Because once the Russians transformed this military process from a special military operation to an anti-terrorist operation, Do I have that right?
That's right.
Now, whether Putin will authorize that or not, I'd suggest he probably won't.
He doesn't have to.
Again, Russia is winning.
No question about that.
Do you think that Trump fears Lindsey Graham and company trying to force his hand?
By enacting legislation by a veto-proof majority that would impose secondary sanctions, that is, sanctions on the people that do business with Russia?
It would be crazy, wouldn't it?
It would be crazy.
Don't they have an economist there?
I mean, Janet Yellen was no good, but my God, didn't they find somebody better?
In other words, this is totally unrealistic.
And, you know, Lindsey Graham is blowing smoke.
Now, the latest hopeful things, Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, that Trump has already called in his friends in Congress and says, look, if you want to pass something this stupid, well, give me veto power of it or have it in the legislation itself that this is at referendum, the president and president has to approve it.
I can buy that.
You know, that's a nice little threat.
Don't try to force me, because you say 80%, forget about it.
I have enough influence to prevent a veto-truth majority.
Let's transition to Gaza, Ray.
What is your understanding of the latest events on the ship on which Greta Thunberg and others were present as they were attempting to deliver aid to the starving people in Gaza?
Well, I just heard from Anne Wright, who's the person on this.
It turns out she wasn't on the boat, but she's doing the public relations thing here.
And she tells me that all those passengers, that they were rammed last night, that they were helicoptered and so forth, and they were taken onto an Israeli naval ship.
They are en route now.
If passed as precedent to Ashdod, the Israeli port, where they let them off, they put them in jail for a couple of days, and then they let them go back to their home countries.
Now, good news is violence was minimal, apparently.
Bad news, of course, is that the Israelis would not even let in a sailboat filled to the gills with medical and other food supplies.
And what does that say?
You know, what the Israelis have said in their own defense is, well, you know, if we let this one in, all kinds of flotillas will come in there and bring this food.
Well, hello.
That means you really want to exterminate.
You really want to starve these people dead.
Is that right?
Of course it's right.
That's what they're out for.
And that was what this flotilla, to their credit, was trying to demonstrate.
Look, if they won't let us in, you know, a sailboat, you know, what kind of...
It's been going on not just since October 7th, but for, what, since 2009, for God's sake.
Blockade, embargo, people sick, can't get treatment, people starving.
I mean, nothing is worse than that.
Oh, there they are.
The era of the Freedom Flotilla ship intercepted by the Israeli military near Gaza.
Yeah, those photos were the last thing we saw before Kamo was broken off, and they were rammed by the Israelis, and I assume either invited or forced to get onto the Israeli naval ship.
I imagine they should reach port in Ashtod, probably within the hour, and if test is precedent, they'll be jail, as I said before.
And then sent to their home countries depending what kind of passport they have.
I regret that there were no Americans on that ship.
I didn't know that before.
Aside from Donald Trump picking up a phone, as you and Larry and Max Blumenthal and Ray and Scott Ritter and Colonel McGregor have argued.
And saying enough is enough, baby.
Who or what?
Who or what can save Gaza?
Just us.
You know, it's up to us.
There never has been anything other than us.
Now, if this doesn't create appropriate outrage, anger on the part of the American people, you know, I'm not going to give up on the American people, but it would certainly be a sign, okay?
And I would remind you, Judge, you know this already because you have studied Thomas Aquinas, but he was very big on the virtue of anger, okay?
Yes.
Why?
Because he wrote about virtue, and there was no word in Latin for the virtue of anger.
So he went back to John Chrysostom of the early church, and he said, he or she who is not angry when there is just cause for anger sins, because anger respite.
Anger looks to the good of justice.
And if you can live amid injustice without anger, you are doing it wrong, folks.
You are sinning.
So, you know, I take some consolation and realize that it's okay to be angry.
You know, for Irish, they give you a couple days more than normal people, but it's not only okay to be angry, it's a virtue, for God's sake.
So let's be virtuous.
Get out there and stop this.
Will any other country intercede?
I mean, President Erdogan of Turkey condemned the ramming and stopping and kidnapping of everybody on the boat.
But that's just words.
He didn't do anything about it.
It is.
The year before we embarked on the U.S. boat to Gaza, 2011, and right with me then, 2010, a great big Nine, I think, people were killed, including an American citizen.
And what did the American government do?
Zippo.
And I would point out in this connection that it was exactly, well, exactly this date, well, June 8th, 1967.
When the Israelis learned they could get away with murder, literally, to include the U.S. Navy, they attacked the USS Liberty in international waters, killed 34 seamen, and wounded 171 others.
That was, what, 53 years ago?
I think I did the math earlier.
Well, you know, when you learn you can get away with murder and that the U.S. government will cover it up and have the Navy cooperate in covering it up.
Well, that's as clear a manifestation as you can get that the Israelis learned very early on that they could get away with murder, and that's what they're doing to a whole populace now, and that's called genocide.
This is when the President of the United States himself, LBJ, ordered jets that had been dispatched to defend the liberty to turn around.
That's right, Judge.
You know, what happened was the commander of the part of the Sixth Fleet out there in the Mediterranean sent two aircraft carriers with their planes aloft to do battle with whoever was attacking his ship, the USS Liberty.
Okay.
Now, a very imaginative seaman on the Liberty got permission from Captain McConnichael to fix the only antenna that wasn't working and that the...
As soon as the SOS went out, the Israelis, of course, intercepted it and got the hell out of Dodge.
Meanwhile, those planes were en route.
I think it was Admiral Geis.
He got a call from McNamara, Secretary of Defense.
You call those planes back.
We don't want you to do anything with respect to the Liberty.
Geis.
Sir, sorry.
I can't.
My men, my ship is being attacked.
I can't take that order.
I have to speak to your supervisor.
Guess what?
LBJ is right, right at McNamara's side.
He gets on here now.
Guys, my order to you is we don't want to embarrass our Israel allies, so you call those planes back, you call them back now or else.
Guys call them back.
Did he get promoted?
You don't question the President or the Secretary of Defense.
They get promoted.
But he did his job.
He followed orders in the final analysis.
The worst thing, of course, Judge, was this is all covered up.
The Liberty survivors met just this past weekend in Norfolk.
I usually go.
I couldn't go this year.
But there are a few left.
And if you want to know about PTSD, have lunch with these guys.
They were told not to tell their wives.
Not to even speak to each other about what had happened.
That's gone by the board now, but my God, most of the other ones besides the 34 already dead or have passed away by now.
Chris is going to cut the clip.
Of your imitation of LBJ's voice.
It's one of the best I've ever heard, Ray.
I know we're talking about very, very serious things, but your imitation of that miserable old bastard was one of the best I ever heard.
Thank you very much, as always, for your time.
Thank you for letting me go all over the place on all of these questions.
Deeply appreciated.
We'll see you with Larry at the end of the week.
I'm not sure when or where because you know he's in Moscow, but we'll pin him down.
At a time that works for you, Ray McGovern.
Okay.
Thank you, Judge.
Sure.
All the best, my dear friend.
▲
Export Selection