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June 26, 2023 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
28:02
Russia Coup...Or Weapon Of Mass Distraction?

If the weekend's attempted Wagner private military company march to Moscow was an actual coup attempt, it will go down as one of history's biggest farces. While NATO was on pins and needles hoping to see Putin defeated, the quick fizzle left them scrambling. Also today: US Rep Gaetz wants to give Biden permission to bomb Chinese troops in Cuba? Beam us up!

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Ruse For The Russians 00:13:29
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
With us today is Daniel McAdams, our co-host.
Daniel, good to see you this morning.
Happy Monday, Dr. Paul.
How are you this morning?
Doing well.
Doing well.
All right.
The world didn't come to an end.
There's no World War III, and the coup looks like it's dying down.
I mean, they did it.
It was a weekend event.
I don't think we talked about it on Friday because I don't think anybody knew about it except our CIA knew.
I'm sure they did.
The CIA knew about the coming coup, which didn't work all that well for the people committing the coup.
But, you know, we had a warning about it, but we weren't on the inside.
Our CIA knew about it.
And that's sort of good.
It always perks up my ears, you know, when the CIA is involved and a coup is on the table.
Are they involved in this?
That couldn't be because it's not going well.
Maybe they were involved in the early stages.
And once they realized that it wasn't going to go well, maybe they had to say, this is all over.
The CIA, we'll give them the benefit of the doubt that they found it by intelligent gathering of information.
But I doubt that, too, because they haven't been very successful in the job they're supposed to be doing.
But anyway, the coup occurred, and it was a type of a rebel group.
It was sort of an unusual set of circumstances.
But it wasn't all a game because some people died there.
I think 16 people died.
And the leader of the coup, he's off in exile, supposedly.
But the world didn't come to an end.
And people are trying to interpret all this.
And I think the best explanation I saw on what happened to it, there was the miscalculation, you know, Prisonoffin.
He figured, and others did, they believed some of their own propaganda, their friends in Ukraine, that counteroffensive is going to really help Russia have another big failure.
Russia will be in chaos, and he was going to grab hold.
Well, the big change there, the surprise was that Russia did a pretty good job.
And people are starting to recognize that it's all over.
Matter of fact, even over here on our side, our neocons were starting to recognize that a long time before this weekend, that things weren't going well.
But this last blast became evidence that it wasn't the case.
And all of a sudden, the support that the rebels thought they were going to guess faded away.
And there was nothing.
And Putin became more powerful.
And in a way, say, well, he's losing because he had to, you know, he didn't capture him or do anything.
I would say under the circumstances, he handled it rather well.
You know, the system was threatened.
But the people that wanted the coup to result were our neocons here at home.
They're disappointed.
and I don't know what they're going to do about it because I don't think they're on the winning side at all.
Yeah, I mean, I sort of hate doing these kinds of stories, Dr. Paul, because usually...
That is quick.
Let's go home.
Usually I have a take on it, and I have a pretty good sense of what's what.
And I have a sense, but I'm not absolutely certain.
But I can say a couple of things.
I think it's the weirdest coup we've ever seen.
You know, and first of all, and Progozhin himself never said it was a coup.
He said, We're going to march on Washington, we're going to march on Moscow, we're going to air our grievances, we don't like the Minister of Defense, we don't like the top general Grasimov, who's in charge of this, and we're going to go lay down our grievances in front of them.
Well, first of all, in a wartime, you don't do that, you don't have armed troops and tanks going to send a message to you.
You know, you wouldn't have that anywhere.
So, it sort of looks like a coup because you simply don't move your military.
But this is a private military company.
I think there's a misunderstanding that it's Progozhin's personal army.
It's not.
It was actually founded by the Russian intelligence FSB.
So, it really is part of the Russian government.
But it was very much the strangest coup ever because you think about the Wagner group.
They were the principal fighters in Bakhmut, and they spent months there.
It was a grueling battle.
They called it the meat grinder.
A lot of Ukrainians died.
They fought fiercely and won.
They used superior tactics and won.
So you think about an organization like this that's proven itself on the battlefield.
Why would they march 1,200 kilometers from Rostov-on-Don to Moscow in one column without any air support, without any backup plan?
So, I mean, they could easily have just been mowed down by the Russian military if that was what's going to happen.
And the Russian military didn't mow them down.
So, I honestly don't know what the heck this means and what its purpose was.
A lot of people will say, Well, it was just a masquerade, it was just a trick that Russia was playing on everyone else.
That's possible, and some people that we know and respect feel that way.
But I honestly ultimately don't know, but it's very, very weird.
A misjudgment was involved there because they, I think, expected an uprising that would be anti-Putin.
And because of the circumstances that are occurring right now, and the Russians are doing rather well against the Ukrainians, I think that didn't occur.
But that's all a misinterpretation of the events.
So, they weren't up to speed if they were really thinking they were going to be successful.
So, it served not too many people's interests.
And I think some of our new cons are proposing, well, it's the end of Putin.
The crack is there.
They didn't have the support, and therefore, this is a victory.
I don't think that's true in a minute.
Yeah, I think the neocons certainly would look at this and say, Well, this just goes to show that we were right all along.
We said with a little bit more pushing that Russia will collapse.
You know, they'll have an overthrow.
We'll get our maid down in Russia.
And that's certainly, you can say on the surface it looks that way.
It looks as if it shows that things aren't as settled as they are.
But what if the whole thing was a ruse?
You know, what if it was a ruse?
And there are people that have pointed out that Progozhin, the head of this, his part of the bargain is that he went to Belarus, and which is with about 3,000 of his fighters.
And apparently, Lukashenko in Belarus is building a camp for them.
But the funny thing is, Rostov-on-Don is about 1,200 or so kilometers from Kiev.
But where they're going to actually be in Belarus is about 200 kilometers from Kiev.
So a lot of people are scratching their heads saying this was a way for them to take their troops all the way into Belarus within striking distance of Kiev without anybody really paying attention to what was happening, just saying that, oh, well, he's in exile.
The people under him are in exile.
So there is a lot of speculation as to what it might mean.
The other thing we, the backdrop to a lot of this, though, Dr. Paul, and you started out by mentioning this, is that the counteroffensive from Ukraine has not been going well.
That was the big news up until Friday's quote-unquote coup.
But the backdrop to this whole thing is the NATO summit, which is coming up in just about two weeks.
And that's a big deal because Ukraine was hoping for some sort of NATO guarantees to be announced at that summit, or at least a roadmap.
And we know that last week Biden said, we're not going to give them any special treatment.
They're not going to get an accelerated entry into NATO.
We're not going to put any goalposts out there that they can meet.
So it's a real disappointment.
So a lot of this stuff, I think, is happening as a backdrop to what was happening in the NATO summit in a couple of weeks, the Vilnius summit.
Excuse me.
Of course, Blinken had a statement about all this.
And on Sunday, he said the short-lived rebellion from the Wagner group shows real, real cracks.
He was making that.
Progoshin himself, and Blinken goes on, and this entire incident has raised profound questions about the very premises for Russia aggression.
See, this is serious stuff.
Russian aggression against premises of Russian aggression against Ukraine in the first place, saying that Ukraine or NATO did not pose a threat to Russia.
So this is image-making, but maybe there will be a shift to this image that has been falsified in a way.
They're not going to be able to get away with it, I don't think, continuously.
The other thing that was interesting is when this started, of course, people in Paris and London and Washington were giddy with glee that this was happening.
There's a coup against Putin.
But then when they started thinking about the implications, they started to panic, and they actually made a panicked phone call to the Ministry of Defense in Russia because all of a sudden it's okay, hold on.
We hate Putin, but we know who he is and where he is and what he is.
If he falls, what about all those thousands of nukes?
You know, whose hands could they fall into?
So it's sort of also a question of be careful what you wish for.
Well, my assessment, which is not a professional military assessment, but my gut reaction is this is going to fade and there's not going to be much come of it.
I don't think there'll be a January 6th trial and put somebody in prison without, they might even get a trial, you know, before that happened.
No, they get a ticket to go on their exile, and who knows what will happen.
But I don't think you're going to see another one these soon.
And those who are saying there's a big crack in the support for Putin and he's on his way out, I think they're wrong there.
I think Putin looks decent compared under these circumstances.
What Kenya look like?
But I think he certainly looks a lot better than the rebels.
It's interesting enough this whole thing was a ruse for the Russians, and this is just what some people say, I don't know, for Putin and his government to see just how much support there was.
The interesting thing part is once this quote-unquote coup was launched, not even his fiercest opponents in the Russian political class signed on to the coup or approved of the coup.
They all rejected.
Even his opponents all rejected it.
Nobody said we're with the coup.
Nobody in the military said we're with the coup.
So it's a way in a way for him to test his leadership.
But, you know, it's interesting because I turned to three people that we know well who've spoken at our conferences because I want to get their views because they're pretty good at military stuff.
And that, of course, is Colonel McGregor, Scott Ritter, and Larry Johnson.
Larry Johnson was a CIA officer.
And Scott Ritter, of course, as you know, was a chief weapons inspector.
And McGregor was a heavily decorated Army officer.
And they each had different takes.
Ritter thought that it was definitely a U.S.-backed coup and that Progozin, this was his first reaction.
I mean, I'm not criticizing at all.
And Progozhin was somehow an agent of the U.S.
And I could see how you could think that at first.
Now, Larry Johnson had a different take, and I thought it was interesting.
So I copied down a couple of things from his latest, second to latest piece.
I think I'll put that first one up.
This is the piece I'm talking about.
Russia's Academy Award-winning performance for best coup.
Progoshin scores best actor.
So that kind of gives you a flavor of where he's going.
And if you go to the next one, here's just a couple of points, and I won't read these all.
I know that's bleary eye-making, but it's interesting.
First of all, I made this point that the Wagner Group was founded and established by Russian intelligence.
So it's not a private Progozian company.
Progoshin has been shooting his mouth off for months, spouting threats against the Russian military and indirectly at Putin.
But the rest of NATO considers Putin and his government as a dictatorship.
And Larry Johnson makes the point: Does this mean Russia is not a dictatorship?
He wasn't arrested or sanctioned for all the time he's been mouthing off against his own commander-in-chief.
So, in the other things I've mentioned, the Russian government waited about 12 hours before sending the police and military forces to the Wagner Group headquarters in St. Petersburg.
There seemed to be very little sense of urgency.
He ordered Progozhin to order a column of Wagner troops to go from Rostov to Moscow to dethrone Shoigu and General Garasimov.
Let's take a look at the map, and I won't put the map up, but he said that's a distance of, as I said, almost 1,200 kilometers.
How is it that a column of trucks and tanks is supposed to refuel and cover that distance in less than 20 hours?
It was an insane, impossible task.
So, I think he makes a few good points here that there's some ways of scratching your head and wondering what's going on.
Yeah, you know, the neocons are identified quite frequently with the CIA.
So, I think they're sitting around probably today very discouraged and disappointed.
Because when you think about the coups, the first coup that we were involved in that I recall was 1953.
Cuba's Dangerous Coast Guard Game 00:10:51
Yeah.
You know, all the way back to Iran.
And we've been involved ever since.
I think we have the record.
And so the CIA has a pretty good record.
They're professionals at it.
So maybe their lesson they're going to learn is: boy, from now on, we're not going to let the locals get in charge and mess up our coup business.
But they did.
There certainly were some misinterpretations there.
And it's, I think, something that they're probably embarrassed by and they're wondering how they're going to show their strength.
Because there will be, you know, the neocon image and the control and the authority that they have here in this country is pretty bold.
When you think the neocons are in charge of the budget for the military, they're in charge of the policy and they're able to control it.
And even though there's noise between the Republicans and Democrats, I think we might even point out where some of the Republicans are very supportive of all this militancy.
And it used to be the Republicans were more than the Democrats.
Then the Democrats all of a sudden got militant.
Now it's worse.
It's bipartisan.
You know, there's too many Republicans and Democrats for the military activity around the world and protecting our empire.
Yeah.
One little funny thing that on the side of this whole thing is because you know the U.S. government has labeled Progozhin and Wagner as terrorists, a terrorist organization.
We've got to get rid of them, sanction them.
Look at this next one.
This is the Wall Street Journal.
This is what they did in the midst of the coup when the U.S. government thought a coup was actually happening.
U.S. to delay sanctions on Wagner for fear of siding with Putin.
So all of a sudden they became the good guys in the middle of this whole thing.
So I thought that was kind of funny.
But I don't know if you're ready to move on.
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Get one of those bad boys and cut some trees up.
So next on our agenda, Dr. Paul, is another bad boy, Matt Gates, who we've praised occasionally, but he seems to kind of lost his way somehow.
Now, I was getting ready to introduce him, but you did a much better job than I did.
But my approach would be, I was going to read what somebody just did, you know, in Congress, wants to give Biden military authorization to take out Chinese assets in Cuba.
Oh, must be one of those new neocon warmonger and Democrats.
Oh, Matt, why'd you do it?
Because, you know, we don't want to jump on Matt Gates crazy because he is pretty good on a lot of the issues.
But it just doesn't follow a pattern.
All of a sudden, they're non-intervention maybe on personal liberty and economic liberty.
But boy, when it comes to empire and telling people how to live and what to do.
And this militarism is just, and, you know, if you had to pick all three, this is the one that's the most deadly because they deal with nuclear weapons on these governments that have this.
So that is too bad.
But he wants to give authorization to the president.
Besides, they don't even need it anymore.
I mean, how many wars have been started without authorization from the Congress?
Well, people give him credit for that.
you have to go through Congress.
But if they want to do that, they should.
I think it's an act of war.
So if you want to go and bomb Chinese assets in Cuba, maybe you have to declare war.
Who knows?
We almost went to war over Cuba.
We should have learned our lesson, but it looks like we haven't.
Yeah, and you're right.
I mean, it's hard to be hard on Gates.
He's been pretty good on the Ukraine-Russia stuff and other things.
I think he has good instincts.
But, you know, you've said this a million times.
You know, they'll be good on this.
Well, we're good on this because we've got to gake out the THICOM.
We've got to take out the Chinese.
Let's put this version of this from Dave DeCamp over at antiwar.com.
This is the article we're talking about.
Representative Gates wants to give Biden military authorization to take out Chinese assets in Cuba, if we can put that one up.
This is the article from Anti-War from Dave DeCamp.
There we go.
And so Matt Gates on Thursday, late last week, told the House Armed Services Committee, he wants to give President Biden the authority to intervene militarily in Cuba to take out Chinese assets that are allegedly on the island.
So there's a lot of things to unpack in just that one sentence, Dr. Paul.
Essentially, what Matt Gates is saying is that he would like to give President Biden, of all people, the ability to literally declare war on China.
If you go to Cuba and kill Chinese military who have been invited to Cuba by Cuba, the Cuban government, if you go kill Chinese soldiers there, you are attacking China.
You know, you are starting World War III with China and Cuba.
So it's the craziest thing.
First of all, why would you give Biden that authority?
But second of all, it's just, you know, it makes no sense at all to declare war on China over this.
Why not just talk to them about it like Kennedy did?
You know, in his little talk on the floor, he was sort of explaining himself to his friend, to my hawk friends on the committee who think I'm too much of a dove.
This amendment is an authorization to use military force to give the President Biden to take out the Chinese assets in Cuba.
So, you know, there is this political maneuvering.
You know, he gets accused of being a hawk, I mean, a dove, and therefore he has to answer to that image.
But he has to believe this.
I mean, he's not somebody who's careless speaking out for things purely political, but the politics has to be wrong on this.
If you're trying to put your politics in a consistent position on foreign policy, that's sort of like an economic policy.
I'm against all this wasteful welfare spending, except for the corporations or something like that.
They always have an exception.
And this is an exception that we don't endorse.
Yeah.
Well, I think Gates, if you look at the way he dresses, he got his hair nice.
He cares about his image.
And you used that word image.
I think it's the appropriate word.
But this is kind of the worst kind of grandstanding.
And it's funny because I had that quote.
I was going to talk about it too because I think that was the exact quote.
Because, you know, hey, my hawk friends, if you think I'm too much of a dove, I'll show you.
I want to declare war on China.
And I was thinking, that doesn't make you look tough.
It makes you look stupid, you know, to declare war on China over this.
So I think this kind of grandstanding and showboating is certainly characteristic of how Washington works, and it shouldn't be.
We'll give him a pass on this one, but he really better behave himself in the future.
It's usually, you know, appealing to the media, too, so you get favorable treatment with the media.
But the media now, you know, is split.
Some are hawks and some are not hawks.
And so he's reaching out there because there was, if you have a little bit of a dove image, maybe he's going to get more attention from the traditional peace next.
But they're not there anymore.
You know, they're all shifting to warmongering and the military industrial complex.
And that's a political decision that we'll probably not talk them in, talk them out of.
Yeah.
Well, this third one you noticed and sent it to me over the weekend.
And it's a head scratcher.
We're scratching our heads today a lot.
But put this next one up.
This is also from antiwar.com.
U.S. Coast Guard cutter makes rare Taiwan straight visit.
And I didn't even get why you sent it at first.
I thought, oh, that, you know, but then I stopped for a second and I said, oh, I know why he sent it.
What the heck is the Coast Guard doing off of China's coast?
But they'd been there since they started the Coast Guard.
They got involved very early on because I think the Korean War was going on or something.
And they were involved.
And that was always such a pet peeve for me because it just is so symbolic of confusion in foreign policy.
And also, the Coast Guard is not even part of the military.
It's part of the Department of Homeland Security.
So Homeland Security is important too, you know.
Maybe they're protecting our borders, you know, down there.
But the Coast Guard's not in the Gulf of Mexico.
Well, they are, but maybe these Coast Guard's gutters, they've been all around the world because they're every place.
It's not like they have two or three Coast Guard cutters that they were sort of protecting our borders or have problems or rescue operations.
That's not what they're all about.
Yeah, before all this goofiness, I had kind of a generally positive view of the Coast Guard.
It sounds good.
Guard our coast.
Our whole military should be guarding our coast.
But this is goofy.
And here's a funny line, if you can put that next clip on, because I know you'll appreciate this.
I highlighted the part that I thought was funny.
The U.S. Coast Guard has vowed to increase its presence near China's coast.
No, no, that's not the right coast.
That's not the right coast to guard.
Oh, you know what?
If we did it, you know, like they do with Cuba, you know, the communists or the Chinese are going into Cuba because we're getting too close to them.
And they're saying, well, you're over here, so they'll have to have a negotiation like Kennedy had to have.
But now, you know, this will, I make fun, but I shouldn't make fun.
I should warn them that this because we're over there going through the straits and to antagonize and see how close we can get to the coastline over there without bumping into a Chinese ship, the more dangerous it gets.
But they, what are we going to do when we have six Chinese vessels in the Gulf of Mexico?
Yeah, what are we going to do then?
And that would be equivalent.
Power Outages and Patriotism 00:03:18
And how would the average American respond to that?
What are you talking about?
We're the United States.
We only promote peace and love.
Yeah, that's right.
Except when the neocons get control of it.
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Dr. Paul, I'm going to finish by saying, don't forget, September 2nd, Washington, D.C.
I will send out the link for the tickets when I get back to my office after the show.
You've got two months to make your plans and come see us in D.C. We're looking forward to it.
Okay, I have a short story.
It may not make you laugh, but you might smile and you might comment.
But this is, I thought, good news.
Politico.
I read and look at Politico because we've used them.
On occasion, they come up with the right issue.
Now, the headline is pretty good.
Hunter Biden got special treatment with his penalties.
The convictions he had.
He was convicted of two crimes.
But it turns out why they think it's special treatment is that he was overly punished.
Oh, he had two misdemeanors.
And they said, most people with these misdemeanors, taxes and guns, nobody goes to jail over that.
But here they go, they picked the president's son on these minor misdemeanor charges.
And he's treated like this.
He's not treated like a dignitary or somebody special.
And they call it especially harsh, harsh treatment.
But here it is.
Here, the conservatives are right on this, attacking the Department of Justice and the FBI, you know, because they are getting special treatment.
Yes, there's special treatment, but this upside down is exactly the opposite reason for this.
I thought that was a little bit entertaining.
So I want to thank our audience today for tuning in to the Liberty Port.
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