The Tucker Carlson Show
Bob Amsterdam: How USAID Is Helping Zelensky Destroy Christianity With Fake Churches and Violence
Wed, 19 Feb 2025
Donald Trump just called Zelensky a dictator. Human rights lawyer Bob Amsterdam has worked in Ukraine for the past couple of years and confirms that if anything, that’s an understatement. (00:00) The Situation Is Dire (03:28) Bob Amsterdam’s Fight to Defend the Orthodox Church From Zelensky (06:45) USAID’s Fake Church Operation (19:14) Mike Pompeo’s Involvement (28:16) Why Is the US Bending the Knee to Ukraine? (33:00) The Push for Sanctions (48:00) China’s Role in Undermining the US Paid partnerships with: Hallow prayer app: Get 3 months free at https://Hallow.com/Tucker Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: What is the current situation in Ukraine?
So thank you for doing this. You're one of the few people who, at the end of our last conversation, I thought, I want to talk to that man again, because you're one of the few people I know who has a real sense of what it's like in Ukraine and has been for the last three years since the war began. How would you summarize the situation in Ukraine right now?
Dire. Situation is dire. Zelensky is wildly unpopular. There are press gangs to take people to the front. People are without hope. And the casualties are enormous. And the corruption is enormous. And imagine sending your child to the front knowing all of this.
Chapter 2: How is Bob Amsterdam defending the Ukrainian Orthodox Church?
As you know, I represent the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, so our parishioners go to the front while their churches are being stolen back home, while parishioners, elderly parishioners and priests are being beaten. And, you know, what I've always said to people who defend Zelensky is, You know, all his numbers are complete fabrications.
If he was popular, if he was trusted, he wouldn't have destroyed the press. He wouldn't be jailing and labeling with treason charges political opponents. There would have been some control on the corruption. I mean, the courts are impossible. It's a police state. The SBU, the secret police, run and intimidate everyone and everything. And yet the Western press has blockaded this story.
The dishonesty of some of the people that are reporting from Ukraine is... is astounding. I've never seen anything like it. I've been involved with cases involving wars and disputes, but the absolute lying and the games that our papers are playing. The Wall Street Journal, for instance, barely has an op-ed that doesn't laud Zelensky.
You never get reality about what's actually going on in the presidential administration. You get no coverage. You know, there's a law, 3894, to destroy the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. No law has been passed like this in Europe since World War II against the Jews. There's no coverage. The argument when I say to the press, how can you do this?
How can you not cover people talking about religious cleansing who are members of the Ukrainian parliament? How can you not cover it? They say, well, this church is somehow a Russian thing. We, you know, as I've told you, we have reached a point where this narrative, the Zelensky narrative has been accepted and our people simply don't challenge it. They fall to it.
And it's really been down to the new administration to put a pin in that balloon. Yeah.
It's kind of hard to skip over you and your role in all this. You're the only American attorney who's worked in Ukraine who I have seen who's telling the truth about what's actually happening there. And for doing that, you've been called a Russian stooge, a Putin worshiper. Your character has been impugned.
can you just take a couple minutes tell us who you are why are you representing the orthodox church in ukraine um are you a putin puppet look um for 45 years
I've done political cases all over the world. We've taken on some big enemies. We took on the United Nations pro bono on behalf of an individual worker for the UN that they had destroyed. We got two assistant secretaries general disciplined in that case that made history inside the U.N. And we were awarded the Global Pro Bono Award from American Lawyer for doing that case.
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Chapter 3: What role does USAID play in the church conflict in Ukraine?
I just want to be clear on this. You were arrested by the Putin government at 2 a.m. in Moscow?
That's right, in 2005, defending a political opponent to Vladimir Putin. and, in fact, have been banned from Russia ever since. I hold no water for Putin. I represent opponents of the Russian government in various countries, continue to represent political opponents of Putin.
It hasn't stopped the Ukrainians from launching a massive disinformation campaign against me because of my defense of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. which is the majority church of Ukraine, which Zelensky and his gang have been trying to destroy. I am on the legal team of some of the priests that they have illegally jailed. We have an individual in Ukraine
who fled the country because Zelensky had literally sent people to basically, I don't want to use the word liquidate him, but he had to virtually run across a border. This is a member of the Rada border. who Yermak took away his security. He had to run across the border to save his life. And his crime was speaking out against a law to destroy his church.
Can we just back up for one second? So you're a, I think it's fair to say, broadest terms, a Jewish liberal from the Bronx who was arrested by Putin. How did you wind up representing the Russian Orthodox Church in Ukraine? Why was that important of all the cases you could take? Why that one?
Well, let's be clear. It's the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. We are not part of the ROC. We are... We share only a canonical link. Our church denounced the invasion. Our church separated itself administratively 30 years ago. And every Ukrainian that's Orthodox has been baptized in our church. Five years ago, a new church was established in Ukraine.
By the Poroshenko administration, with the active connivance of the United States government, the State Department of the United States was involved in the establishment of the church. I believe either USAID or some other organizations have funded this state church called the OCU Church.
This is basically kind of a CIA operation, if you will, to set up a church that would be completely free of what they viewed as the dangerous Putin influence. So you have our State Department violating our Constitution openly, engaging in the destruction of religious freedom in a foreign country, doing things absolutely illegal under our Constitution. Like establishing religion.
Yes, all in the name of anti-Putin activities. And because I am so very strongly against the present Russian administration, I insisted on traveling to Kiev with a bunch of my lawyers to interview—we were privileged to meet with the Holy Synod—to meet with senior members of the church—
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Chapter 4: How is Mike Pompeo involved in Ukraine's church issues?
One senator had the courage to stand up and speak out. And that man, God bless him, is now the vice president of the United States. He was the only one. J.D. Vance was the only one? The only one. Absolutely. And he will, I will forever be in his debt because he took the destruction of Christ's children seriously enough to raise it. And he was outraged that our government was allowing it.
He didn't even go so far. I don't think he understood that we were in fact funding and supporting it. And there is a guy in the Ukrainian government, a Mr. Yelensky, not Zelensky, Yelensky, who's been in charge of the destruction of this church for years now. His lifeblood is to destroy this church. He helps—I'm sure he directs the SBU to jail these priests I work with. Guess who— Yelensky?
Yelensky with a Y, and he's written some very interesting books. I don't want to get into that. About what? Just nothing – everything you can think of against religious freedom, he has written about when it was the Soviet Union. Really? Well, he wrote a book about Zionism and clericalism. This is the guy that is heading up their department of – religion, essentially, and freedom.
This guy was honored and given an honored position at the Religious Freedom Conference in Washington.
Wait, the persecutor of the Orthodox Church was given a position of prominence at a religious freedom conference. You have that right. What conference was, I mean, this sounds.
This is the one that was in Washington, a huge conference that went right before the prayer breakfast in Washington. Did anyone say anything other than you? No, no, because nobody, the only thing they were worried about, I got a call.
What about all the Christians?
They're silent. I got a call.
Why is it left to you? I mean, this is the point where I feel like pulling my hair out. Well, I tell you— Why is this your job? Well, and let me tell you— What about Mike Johnson and all these other Christians in the Congress are always talking about how Christian they are?
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Chapter 5: Why is the US showing support for Ukraine?
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Go to puretalk.com slash Tucker. Visit puretalk.com slash Tucker for details. America's wireless company. Do you know who at the State Department worked on this op to create a fake church? Yes, yes.
It dates back to 2014. We believe it began with Victoria Newland. who, I mean, this was a big operation because she worked with the ambassador of the United States to Ukraine, amazingly becomes the ambassador of the United States to Greece. And it is, in fact, the patriarch of the Constantinople church.
that becomes the one who engineers basically the destruction of our church by taking canonical control away from Moscow and taking it to himself, violating a treaty from the 17th century. So we have the United States. And by the way, this was engineered by Secretary of State Pompeo. So this isn't just a Democrat thing. Secretary of State Pompeo was directly involved.
Well, the difference between Toria Newland and Mike Pompeo is negligible. There's no difference at all that I'm aware of. He may be slightly smarter. He's smarter than she is and therefore more sinister. But they have the same views on everything.
Well, in any event, Pompeo was involved in basically having this, what's called in religious terms, a tomos granted so that Ukraine could establish an autocephalous church. This is in 2019. So the church that is allegedly now a clean church away from Russia is five years old.
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Chapter 6: What are the implications of sanctions on Russia?
have developed the most sophisticated propaganda and information campaign I've ever seen. I have never seen any country engage in this level of competent, highly sophisticated disinformation. By the way, they accuse the Russians of. There is no day of the week the Russians have been 10% as effective as the Ukrainians.
I will say, knowing the Russians, very smart, lead the world in chess and engineering, but they're just embarrassing on the propaganda question. They're bad. They're bad. Embarrassing. They are. They're bad. I mean, I'm not, you know, I like Russia, but I'm not. It's just a fact. They're not good at that stuff at all.
No. And, you know, I fought them and we were quite successful at exposing the false charges against some leading Russian businessmen. So I've seen them in action, but I've never seen anything as effective at developing the American narrative as the Ukrainian narrative in the United States, exerting huge levels of control over media coverage.
I mean, we had an interview with The Guardian three days or four days after I got back. Very, very, very competent reporter. Took down notes, was in shock at what happened. The Guardian never published the story. This is The Guardian, who will publish anything about anybody involving human rights. They wouldn't publish the story. Because it went against, there's two obstacles.
One, it goes against the Russian narrative. And two, all of the guys on the ground for the Western press sell books on Ukraine. And I do wonder if there's a commercial motive in the reporting. Because if you look, and some of these guys are my friends, but I got to wonder, if you look at it, no wonder they're notoriously blind to what's going on.
Well, there's some kind of unspoken motive here because none of this makes any sense. I mean, Ukraine is so far outside of our orbit. Ukraine, it's not one of those countries I thought had any influence over American foreign policy or public discourse at all. And all of a sudden, you can't even say an obvious truth about the country or you get in trouble or in my case, you get fired or whatever.
What is that actually about? What are the deeper interests here? Do you have any clue? Look, as I said – No other country could do that no matter how sophisticated the propaganda is or almost no other country.
Look, I have said to myself because I've done many –
many controversial cases in my career yeah nothing's ever approached this in terms of the blowback when you're you know you say to somebody like all of these people today that are speaking out about the president's statement about four percent and they're saying oh that's crap it's 60 right so the president said that zelensky had an approval rating of four percent right i'm sorry so
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Chapter 7: How does China fit into the US-Ukraine-Russia dynamics?
We're never going to allow any demagogue or group of demagogues to say that group right there is not entitled to human rights and we're going to hurt them. I thought that was the lesson. I'm 55. I grew up in a country that, remember that?
Let me tell you something. This law in Ukraine, Law 3894, is one of the most dangerous pieces of legislation I've ever seen. And it's not alone. In Estonia, they're attempting to destroy the Russian Orthodox Church. These Baltic countries that are bulwarks of freedom and democracy are going after those churches too.
And even though those churches are not separate from Russia, and I recognize that, and yes, the Russian Orthodox Church has been instrumentalized, I agree. I still say under a rule of law state, you go after those people who commit offenses. You do not ban a church. If you start banning people's religions, then how are you better than what you oppose? Exactly.
And yet the Religious Freedom Conference honors the very author of this insane legislation. Who sponsored this conference? It's, you know, all I know is I think there's a chairman who's a former Republican senator. I think it's made up of charitable donations. I haven't studied who the sponsor is. I'm sure there's U.S. government involvement. Mr. Vance, Vice President Vance spoke, spoke very well.
I mean, he's, as I said before, I mean, he's set off a revolution in Europe with his speech, which I welcome, because I believe he's identified a tremendous problem in Europe in terms of, Freedom of speech and the basic freedoms, although I have to say, working in Georgia, working and knowing what's happening in Transnistria, you cannot minimize the threat of Vladimir Putin. It exists.
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