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June 2, 2025 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
30:37
From Kiev, Lindsey Graham Blows Up Trump's Ukraine Policy

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Time Text
Knew It Was a Big Deal 00:12:42
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning into the Liberty Report.
With us today, we have Daniel McAdams, our co-host.
Daniel, good to see you this morning.
Happy Monday, Dr. Paul.
How are you today?
Doing fine.
Thank you.
Good, good.
The gold market is doing fine for the people who own gold, but the people who are worried about the conditions of the world, it's not so fine because gold's indicating there's some excitement someplace in the world.
And if you only looked at the gold price, you'd have to look for what brought this up.
Well, there's a little bit of activity in Russia, and that is in Russia, not on a Russian border, not in Ukraine, but in Russia.
And significantly so, that Ukraine has pulled off one, and it's a big deal because it could mean a lot of trouble, even though militarily they haven't taken over a lot of land and they didn't invade with an army.
But, you know, philosophically and propaganda-wise, this is a big deal.
And it's not going to show military strength as it will.
I would worry more about the stimulation of what the Russians might do to not look weak.
They're going to look weak now, but the Ukrainians look stronger than I think they really are.
But anyway, it got the attention of the markets and gold went up close to $90.
And of course, the first reaction is, what will the Russians do?
And how much will this accelerate and come and make the war more complex?
And it could do a lot more.
Depends on what Russia does.
Maybe they have something else to say about it.
But the claim was they destroyed some airplanes.
And it was one of these things where they had to pull it off.
And I just wonder, I don't believe things like this.
This might be about paranoia or something or my instincts.
I don't think things like this happen, especially since we invested $200 billion in Ukraine.
Now, we didn't give them a little help or a little encouragement, but we don't know exactly who paid the bills for the missiles that they shot.
But anyway, it is a big deal.
And economically, it's a big deal.
And politically, it is.
And what happens here in the next few days might make a big difference.
It may accelerate quickly, or it may just disappear this week, and people just go on to the next fight.
Yeah, Dr. Paul, it was a spectacular attack that took place on Sunday morning.
And spectacular because for the first time ever, Russian military facilities were attacked deep inside Siberia.
Now, there's been a lot of cross-border attacks.
There's been a lot of attempts to send drones into Moscow.
But this was a successful attack deep, deep inside Russia.
And it targeted Russia's strategic bombers, so like the equivalent of RB-52s, I suppose.
And it was a spectacular attack.
There's no questioning.
And it was a brave and bold and very unpredictable military operation.
And what happened apparently is that there was a warehouse or a house inside Russia that was, they were collecting these drones and they kept them there and they developed these trucks with this fake compartment on top, false roof.
So if you look inside, it just looks like a regular truck.
But between that false roof and the real roof were all of these drones.
And they went to five different military bases inside Russia.
They looked like regular old cargo trucks.
They managed to attack only two of the five.
But nevertheless, when they arrived there right outside the bases, the artificial top came off and the drones shot up into the air and they went and attacked the Tupolevs, the strategic bombers.
And they successfully, now, Ukraine, of course, being Ukraine, which I guess is natural in war, claimed that they destroyed 41 of the strategic bombers, which is not true.
But they did manage to destroy at least two and damage at least two more.
So it won't put the Russian Air Force on its back legs for a number of reasons.
First of all, missiles have really taken predominance over air-delivered weaponry, what have you.
Nevertheless, it was an incredible PR victory for Ukraine.
And it was a psychological victory because what it did show is all of the stereotypes about Russia being not as strong as they seem, not as adept as they seem to be, and all of these things.
And of course, the backdrop to this entire thing was today's second round of negotiations between Russia and Ukraine that took place in Istanbul.
So Ukraine decided to go out with a bang on the eve of these negotiations.
And I think the question might be, well, what were they hoping to achieve?
Victory, no, as you said in your opening, but I suspect they wanted to do something that would so enrage the Russians that the Russians would refuse to show up in Istanbul, and that would give them another PR victory.
Look, the Russians don't want peace.
We showed up talking about peace.
We hit legitimate military targets, which is true.
And they're throwing a fit and they won't show up.
They obviously don't want peace.
The Russians did show up, so they didn't get that part of it.
But nevertheless, this is certainly dominating the news side.
Right.
And it certainly shows that Zelensky has bragging rights, at least for a day or two or three.
No question.
But the reaction that Russia might get involved in is the big deal.
And I don't think they'll go, I don't think they're going to forget the incident.
I mean, they will retaliate someplace, but we don't know what will happen there.
But it's just another thing that it annoys me to know, and is why are we involved in this war?
It's not getting less.
The only question comes up once in a while is maybe we don't have enough money.
But, oh, well, we have a new age that we're living in.
It's to cut back spending, reduce the deficit.
So we get a new president.
But the deficit hasn't gone down.
It's as big as ever.
They've tried to cut a lot, and a lot of the cuts aren't working very well.
But they don't even try to cut the military debt, you know, and military-industrial complex on and on.
So regardless of Zelensky's bragging rights, I don't think Zelensky would be in the condition he is now if we weren't as NATO operating as a NATO ally and bringing about a coup that eventually put him into power, he would be a nothing.
And if NATO had obeyed the consensus of what they should have on the agreements when the Cold War ended, that would have ended it.
But this to me is more aggravation.
It could increase the retaliation.
It doesn't, I don't think it's going to make sure, oh, we know that Zelensky can do this, and the Russians are going to hurry up and sign a peace treaty with him.
I don't think that's going to happen.
Well, kind of the funny thing is that Ukrainians, as well as some in the media, have referred to this as Russia's Pearl Harbor.
Now, you could say it was a sneak attack and it successfully destroyed some things, but I think you kind of need to open a history book and figure out a couple things.
First of all, how it ended.
It didn't end well for Japan after they committed this Pearl Harbor.
And the second of all, because we know that FDR knew about it in advance, I seriously doubt Putin knew about it in advance.
But you just got done saying, why are we still involved?
And that's a great question.
But I think another question to ask is: how much was the U.S. involved in this attack?
And I'm going to go to a couple of clips here because you can skip that first one because we've kind of introduced that one.
Go to the second one.
While this is clearly a PR victory.
Now, this is our old friend Larry Johnson, Dr. Paul, writing on Sonar 21.
For our viewers not familiar, Larry Johnson is a former CIA counterintelligence expert who writes extensively on geopolitics and has been our guest speaker, I think, a couple of times at our conferences.
So this is Larry's take on how much the U.S. was involved.
He said, while this is clearly a PR victory for Ukraine, it is a classic example of a Pyrrhic victory, i.e., a tactical win leading to a strategic defeat.
The Trump administration is denying any knowledge of the attack.
I take that disavowal with a big grain of salt.
People within the CIA and U.S. UCOM offices who are providing assistance to Ukraine very likely knew about the plan and may have even provided intelligence support to get drones to their targets.
Like any, this is important here, like any covert operation, they may have tried to give Trump plausible deniability, but the Russians know how the game is played.
Now, they certainly don't want to make it look like Trump knew.
And originally, Axios, the news agency, had posted that Trump had been briefed beforehand.
They changed that story quickly.
They probably got an angry call from someone.
They changed that quickly because if Trump had officially been notified beforehand and knew of this and had approved it, it brings the U.S. extremely close to war, especially according to Russia's updated nuclear doctrine, which took place, I think was changed in 2023, that said any country who uses either conventional or nuclear weapons to interfere with our nuclear triad will be responded to with a nuclear weapon against them.
But Trump really gets in the middle of it because if he knows about it and everybody knows he knows about it, like you say, that's a danger.
But if he doesn't know about it, it doesn't say, where are his helpers?
Who's in charge?
Yeah.
Yeah.
And he's not bashful in finding out what's going on in his administration.
So I don't think, you know, they're trying right now to not overburden Trump.
But eventually history won't say, oh, yeah, he was out doing something.
Motor's law.
Yeah, playing some golf.
Yeah.
That'd be a better one.
I mean, we think we had four years of now we realize that President Biden wasn't doing very much at all.
Everyone else was doing, even signing the stuff.
It wasn't him.
So now the question arises, how much is Trump involved with these things?
Now, this next clip is something that I have not been able to verify.
So I'm just putting it out there.
It's something on X. May or may not be true, but it's something to ponder.
U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth received real-time information on the development of the Ukraine drone attacks on Russian air bases on June 1st.
How involved was Hegseth in the planning and execution of this?
And did he apprise his commander-in-chief, President Trump, of the operation?
It's a big question, and we don't have the answer to that.
And one other thing before we go into someone that we do know was involved in it.
If you go to that next one, now this is something, I don't know that we talked about it on the show, Dr. Paul, but this is something very bizarre that Trump put out on his social media a few days ago, i.e., a few days before the attack.
Donald Trump wrote, What Vladimir Putin doesn't realize is that if it weren't for me, lots of really bad things would have already happened to Russia.
And I mean, really bad, all caps.
He's playing with fire.
Now, this may just be a coincidence that he put this out a couple of days before the drone attacks, Dr. Paul, but it certainly leaves a lot of people scratching their heads as to what he was talking about, who he was holding back from doing really bad things to Russia, and whether he voluntarily stopped withholding them or they opposed him, defied him, and did it anyway.
Graham's Subversion 00:13:17
Very interesting, in my opinion.
You know, the thing, Hegseth has a tremendous amount of power.
And I have a statement here of just a general statement on how he thinks of the military.
And of course, this was in relation to Taiwan, but it should be these are his thoughts on a position that he has a lot to say about war.
And in quotes, he says, in certain circumstances, if deterrence fails and if called upon by my commander-in-chief, we are prepared to do what the Department of Defense does best.
This is where I get loud.
What do they do best?
Fight and win decisively, Hegseth said.
And my reaction was, I wonder if he remembers Vietnam.
I wonder if he remembers anything about Korea.
I wonder if he remembers anything in the Middle East, one or two.
What does he know about Afghanistan?
What about, did we win clearly?
Oh, no, we're still fighting Ukraine.
So maybe he still has a chance.
But that to me is an attitude that is so pompous.
What about the Houthis?
The Houthis.
They're winning too.
That gets to show that wars that are done carelessly and not following the rules, like declaring war and getting people truly behind it and pay for them instead of turning it into a money game and competition, who owns this land and border disputes.
So to me, it's a shame.
But this idea that I think most Americans want that to happen.
I can remember talking about, well, if you get involved, why don't you fight to win it?
And it was going on and on and on.
And I thought sometimes I got to thinking, maybe they don't want it to end real fast.
Every once in a while, you look at that and you think it could be over, but they don't do something.
Oh, boy, we better spend some more money.
We need to send more money.
Maybe this will happen.
Look, the Ukrainians aren't doing that badly.
If they can do this, they may be on the upper hand.
So we better help them before Russia invades Europe.
Who knows?
Well, on Hegseth, he also made another boneheaded gaffe at that same speech because he was talking about the U.S. would go to war with China for Taiwan, not realizing, I suppose, that our long-standing policy has been a one-China policy.
We don't recognize the independence of Taiwan as a separate country in the first place.
So he put his foot in his mouth.
I guess he's good at exercising with the troops, but maybe not necessarily understanding the complexities of foreign policy or running the Pentagon.
But I do want to go on, Dr. Paul, because our speculation is, did the president know?
How much did he know?
Did Hegseth know?
We know one person who has been involved, and he's been involved for a long time.
That's why we titled this from Kiev, Lindsey Graham Blows Up Trump's Ukraine Policy, because President Trump has said, since before he was elected, my goal is to end the war in Ukraine.
And I believe he is sincere in this.
I believe he really wants to end the war.
But we know that Senator Graham does not want the war to end.
In fact, he wants to undermine President Trump's foreign policy when it comes to Ukraine.
And so think about this, Dr. Paul.
Just two days before the spectacular Ukrainian attack, here comes Lindsey Graham with Senator Dick Blumenthal, Democrat from Connecticut.
They arrive in Kiev to have talks with Zelensky two days before the attack.
What were they talking about?
Was he giving them a green light?
What was his involvement in this?
Was it just a coincidence that he happened to show up a couple of days before?
But that would raise the question: does Graham have that much clout that he can turn these bombs on or off again?
That they get the directions from him?
And yet that would indicate a close association with the entire administration, and including the boss.
But that raises as many questions as it answers for me.
You know, we've always been critical of the strong presidency, of course, but really, according to the Constitution, the president does have broad foreign policy authority.
It's legitimate constitutional authority.
You can't just have a senator or congressman or Joe Blow going overseas and making U.S. policy.
It doesn't work that way.
It's a recipe for disaster.
No, and that has happened sometimes where they start the war and carelessly starting it, and then our troops get in harm's way.
If you vote against it, you don't even care about protecting our troops.
You won't even send over the money for them to come home.
You know, the whole hypocrisy of the issue.
Well, I want to show a couple of clips now.
This is the keep in mind the context.
This is two days before the spectacular attacks against Russia.
Here is Senator Lindsey Graham arriving in Kiev.
Let's put that first clip on.
I'm just going to, I have four clips, Dr. Paul.
I'm just going to play them one by one just so we get the timeline down.
I'm going to go in reverse order so we get the context of how involved Graham is.
Let's do that first one now, play the whole one.
Here he is arriving a couple of days ago.
Good decision.
Welcome.
Taking decisions.
Good decision to keep on.
Thank you.
Thank you for coming, Keep for having us.
We're back to the United States.
Mr. President, let's cut to that second one.
Here is Lindsey Graham after his meeting with President Zelensky giving a briefing to the press.
President Trump said that Ukraine doesn't have good cards.
Well, Russia is much bigger and has a lot more people.
I get that.
But the world has a lot of cards against Russia.
And one of those cards that we have is about to be played in the United States Senate.
In America, you have more than one person at the guard table.
We have three branches of government, and the House and the Senate are poised to act.
What would change our mind if Russia came to the table, agreed to ceasefire, and earn here?
He is literally undermining President Trump's foreign policy.
President Trump says that Ukraine doesn't have any cards on the table, but we and the rest of the world think they have a lot of cards on the table, so we're going to pass legislation to keep this war going.
You know, and these are his 500% bone-crushing tariffs on any country that does business with Russia, all these sorts of things.
So, he's introduced now.
There are three branches of government, as you know, Dr. Paul, but not all three branches can make U.S. foreign policy.
Sounds like he doesn't just represent the United States, he represents the world, not everybody against his president.
Yeah, you know.
Well, let's go to that third one now.
Now, this is remember this.
Okay, now this is don't play it quite yet because I want to set it up.
We remember this because we showed this clip on the show before, Dr. Paul.
This is in 2016, before Trump was elected, when it looked like Hillary Clinton was going to be elected, if you remember, and she was very gung-ho on war with Russia, and Trump was very, very low in the polls, according to the official polls.
So, Senator Graham, the late John McCain, and Amy Klobuchar went over to Ukraine just before the election and told the Ukrainian troops, you're going to get your war against Russia soon.
Let's play this as a reminder.
I admire the fact that you will fight for your homeland.
Your fight is our fight.
2017 will be the year of offense.
All of us will go back to Washington and we will push the case against Russia.
Enough of a Russian aggression.
Okay, we can stop this time here now.
So, he's promising them that next year, 2017, will be the year of offense.
I'm going to go back home.
And this is when he thought Hillary would win.
But what happened?
A surprise victory for Trump, Dr. Paul.
And that ruined his plans.
So, what did he do after the surprise victory for Trump?
He went on and he claimed that it was only Trump only won because the Russians interfered in our elections.
He was one of the first originators of the Russia gate scam.
Let's do that last one and listen to him making that exact claim that Trump was not legitimately elected president.
We're going to go back and tell our colleagues what Russia is up to and the Baltics, what they're doing in the Ukraine.
We're going to get briefed about Georgia.
We hope to make 2017 a year of offense.
We believe that Putin has hacked into our elections in America, that he's trying to undermine democracy all over the world.
And it's time for new sanctions to hit him hard as an individual.
His energy sector, his bank.
That's exactly that one.
So you get this timeline is important.
He didn't get Hillary who he wanted, and so he claimed that the elections were stolen by Putin to put Trump in office.
And, you know, if war was that important to him and we were endangered by policy that's going on, he's in the wrong place.
Why isn't he talking to his colleagues and saying, you know, the only way we can do this legitimately, since we're defending our Constitution and our way of life and our system of government, why don't we, you know, get a commitment from the people through a declaration of war?
Exactly.
That drives them nuts.
And then when you bring a subject like that, this technicality, you just interfering with our brilliance.
That's their attitude.
Yeah.
That they know what's best.
Well, I hope someone has told President Trump what Lindsey Graham has been up to and how he's been undermining his foreign policy.
We're critical of Trump.
We don't like the way he's going about trying to achieve this peace.
We're the Monday morning quarterbacks on this, perhaps, but we do admire his genuine interest in peace there.
And so you have this guy going over there as a senator, undermining the president's policy.
It's terrible, terrible stuff.
Horrible.
Well, let's move on, if you like, to the next one.
And this is, I guess, a short update because it's the Iran situation.
Now, it's kind of a busy Monday.
Usually sometimes on Monday, we don't really have much to talk about.
But Iran has responded to the U.S. offer during the latest rounds of negotiations and has rejected that offer.
My understanding of the offer was basically this.
And this is a crude interpretation of it.
Essentially, Iran gives up all rights to enrichment.
Iran gets rid of all enriched uranium.
And in exchange, Iran doesn't get sanctions relief immediately, but in a gradual way.
And this goes up against several of the red lines.
So at this point, the talks are stalled, it looks like, unfortunately, with Iran.
You know, in this debate going on about how to handle this, President Trump argued that any revised nuclear accord with Iran should permit, this is where I run into a brick wall, should permit the United States to destroy the country's nuclear infrastructure and send inspectors to Iranian facilities at any time.
Allow us to blow up whatever we want.
And so it's almost speaking for Graham.
Or Netanyahu.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's a terrible position.
When that came out, actually, you put that last clip up because this is from anti-war.
Trump says new Iran deal must allow U.S. to, quote, blow up whatever we want.
I don't know.
I mean, I don't know.
Trump wants a deal.
He says he wasn't going to bomb Iran.
But I don't know who told him that this would be a good thing to say to convince the Iranians that this is a good deal.
Hey, let's sign immediately.
This sounds like a heck of a deal for us.
We get to get blown up whenever he wants.
Well, you know, it's a problem for us.
Where do we go?
Wake Up Call 00:04:35
Of course, we've been in politics per se, in a way, you know, trying to get a message out there.
And we did a teeny bit of good, I'm sure, there.
But I think ultimately, what we're trying to do here with our supporters that tune us in to try to understand what's going on, and we have to wake up the people.
But the people do wake up, but it's always, in my estimation, a little late because the propagandists, the Grahams get, you know, front road on this, and they get this, the people who want the war and want the spending.
They say, oh, no, we don't want the war.
We just want the profits.
You know, we have to have a reason, but it's always to make us safe and have security.
And they give this justification.
And it's hard for people to dissect it up.
I think it's because they don't have enough information.
But I think we live in an age where we shouldn't cry about that because, you know, I've been trying to get a message out for a long time.
And it's usually one person at a time.
And even now, it's minuscule.
But it's out there.
There's a few talk shows or pundits on tele on the interviews on the internet.
They're fantastic.
And there's a lot of bad stuff, but it's available for the people.
So I think we try in our meager way to wake people up.
And sometimes we do.
But that's a big job.
But I just keep thinking if you wake up one, they might wake up 10.
An idea, if it's really a good one and you can alert the people, it can't be stopped.
And I hope peace can't be stopped.
Well, we'll keep doing it.
I'm going to close.
I do want to thank Georgist, who kicked in 40 bucks.
He quoted something that Thomas Massey put up on X.
And I don't have the exact quote before me, but Massey was talking about the slaughters in Gaza of civilians.
And he said the U.S. should end all military aid to Israel.
It's probably the first time in a long time a member of the House of Representatives made that statement.
And I'm sure there are a lot of knives that are being drawn, hopefully only metaphorically, for Massey for suing that.
So thanks, Georges, for helping support us.
And I do want to remind all of you of August 16th, our DC Dulles Conference.
We're going to have tickets on sale in the next couple of days, maybe as early as tomorrow.
I just got to get a couple of things ironed out.
It's going to be a really good one.
It's going to be a lot of fun, as usual.
I haven't talked about it in a while.
I've just been getting some things organized about it, but you're all going to want to go there August 16th.
Make plans to come join us.
Over to you, Dr. Paul.
Very good.
I want to talk a minute about paying for wars and all these involvements that we have around the world.
Because, you know, today I mentioned the fact that the gold price was real high because this incident, big incident that's occurring in Russia and with the Zelensky.
And the response is that we're going to keep spending.
But it's also the answer to it.
If we didn't have a monetary system that promises to monetize all debt, you know, nobody could even think about doing this.
We wouldn't have the money.
We wouldn't have the resources.
We wouldn't rob the poor people by giving them inflation and paying all the bills.
We wouldn't expose all the innocent victims who die in these wars.
And that is, if you say that we don't have the money, we can't do it.
We'll seek peace in another manner.
And believe me, there are other methods with this, in doing this, other than looking for a nuclear holocaust.
There are ways that this can be worked out.
So honest money can do a lot to steer us in the right direction, following the Constitution about we can't get involved in these wars.
And they say, well, we'll do it secretly and you won't know about it.
And then we'll have the media on our side.
We'll have the military and complex on our side.
We'll have the educational system on our side.
And so far they're getting away with it.
But we need to awaken a lot of people still to resist the temptation to support this type of an attitude because it's leading us to a very, very dangerous period in our history.
And yet the answer is not complicated.
It's easily done.
And that is just seeking out the precise definition of peace and prosperity.
I believe that is the way to go.
I want to thank everybody for tuning in today to the Liberty Report.
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