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Nov. 8, 2024 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
27:43
INTEL Roundtable w/ Johnson & McGovern : Weekly Wrap
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Hi, everyone.
Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
Today is Friday, November 8th, 2024.
It's the end of the week, the end of the day.
It's our favorite time with our Intelligence Community Roundtable with my two dear friends and collaborators, Larry Johnson and Ray McGovern.
Gentlemen, welcome here.
Double Duty is terrific.
Boy, we don't have much to talk about, do we?
Nothing going on.
We could go for two hours with all the things that have happened in the past week.
We'll start with the election and to you first, Larry, because you wrote about this very passionately in your posting this morning or late last night on Sonar 21. If Donald Trump is seriously considering for the national security appointees to
People like Marco Rubio, Mike Pompeo, Tom Cotton, Nikki Haley, Rick Grinnell.
Will that tell us that he has learned nothing?
In the past eight years.
Well, I wouldn't put Grinnell in that group, because Grinnell, unlike those other three, has been quite loyal and supportive of Trump over the years.
But my question is aimed, I know you're furious at Pompeo for not being loyal, and the evidence of that is ample, but my question is aimed at their neocon bellicose tendencies.
Yeah, well, with respect to What we're seeing are the neocons in D.C. went to the media and they put the story out that Donald Trump was considering these.
I don't think it's true.
Particularly when you look at Tucker Carlson and his close relationship with Trump.
That has been solidified over the last three months.
Carlson's on the record calling Pompeo a criminal who ought to be prosecuted.
So you can imagine that Tucker's whispering in Donald's ear with respect to that.
Similarly, Jack Posobiec and others have been just excoriating Pompeo for his past comments where he refused to defend Donald Trump in a bogus case that was being brought by the Special Prosecutor Jack Smith over classified documents, refused to speak out on Donald Trump's behalf, accusing him of being a January 6th insurrectionist, the leader of that.
So you're right that if, in fact, he was considering these people, he might as well hang his presidency up because they will undermine him.
But I think this is one of those information operations where everybody puts out and says, oh yeah, I'm under consideration, except only in their own mind.
Trump demonstrated with his first pick, Susie Wiles, as his chief of staff, That he's not going for the glitz and glamour like he did in 2017.
2017, he went with the Old Boys Club, Reince Priebus, and all these other characters who were basically deep staters.
She's not a deep stater.
She comes from outside and she ran a hell of a campaign.
And her father was the greatest kicker the New York Giants ever had.
A guy by the name of Pat Summerall.
I didn't know that until this morning.
I remember hugging Pat Summerall as a kid.
Before you weigh in on this, Ray, here is one of those neocons trying to shed his neocon image as he makes a pitch to be named Secretary of State.
Cut number nine, Chris.
Who wants war?
What he's talking about is he wants the war to end.
Now, as a businessman, he's not going to tell you about his negotiating tactic to bring it to a close, They don't admit it publicly, but if you ask the Biden decision, they will tell you we are funding a stalemate.
I think the Ukrainians have been incredibly brave and strong and standing up to Russia, but at the end of the day, what we are funding here is a stalemate war.
and it needs to be brought to a conclusion because that country is gonna be set back 100 years.
Now, that doesn't mean that we celebrate what Vladimir Putin did or are excited about it, but I think there has to also be some common sense here, and that is that right now what we are funding is a stalemate that's costing lives, and putting Ukraine, it's gonna take 100 years to rebuild that poor country with everything they are facing.
Of course, young Marco is plumbing for the job of Secretary of State.
I think Larry is exactly right.
They're putting out these rumors.
But I think the most conclusive proof that it might be a happier ending for Trump with respect to his selectees is when he was on Joe Rogan's show about three weeks ago.
I listened to the whole thing, let's say.
And when he was asked by Joe, do you regret anything?
Do you make any mistakes?
He said, oh, did I make mistakes?
I came into Washington.
I didn't know anybody.
And the people I picked were really bad.
Most of them, some of them were.
So, yeah, I made mistakes in picking the wrong people, and they did me in.
I'm not going to make that mistake again.
So I think that argues from the horse's mouth.
That argues in favor of Trump, having learned a lot during those four years, and subsequently.
I think I'd be really careful against picking the likes of Rubio as well as the other ones mentioned before.
Well, if he picks Pompeo, it would cause a major, major conflagration amongst many of his people, typified by Larry, who ardently, ardently supported him.
Do you think, Larry, well, Larry, let me ask you this.
Who really runs American foreign policy?
The president, the secretary of state, the intelligence community?
Who makes the decisions that affect the lives of foreign governments every day?
Well, it can ultimately be the president.
It just depends on whether they're going to exercise judgment and leadership.
I know specifically from somebody who was involved with the decision that Donald Trump made to kill the Iranian General Soleimani that initially that wasn't Trump's idea.
That wasn't at Trump's insistence.
But he got so much pressure.
From the Department of Defense, from the National Security Advisor, who I believe was John Bolton at the time, and from the CIA, that he caved.
So, you know, you've got to step back and say, okay, who made policy there?
Well, you know, in that case, Trump caved and allowed that to go forward.
So, it really, you know, Trump has got a unique opportunity here.
And I'm not some big Trump fanboy.
Historically, we've never had anybody like Donald Trump where he has faced the kind of intense lawfare over the last seven years where they tried to put him in prison, charged him with everything possible.
And yet, despite all of that, and despite now clear evidence that the 2020 election was stolen from him, yet he's still standing and he avoided an assassin's bullet.
With all of that, he hasn't come out as some bitter, angry guy.
We saw at the Al Smith dinner, he was making good-natured comments about Chuck Schumer, who had not had a kind word to say about Trump for some time.
Kind words for Eric Adams and Catherine Holder.
They seated Chuck next to Trump.
It's probably the closest he's ever been to him.
He didn't have much of a choice.
Oh, yeah, but he patted him on the back.
But my point is, and then surviving that assassination attempt.
He saw God.
He suddenly realized, you know what?
I may not live forever.
Ray, what can the intelligence community do to undermine the president?
Well, I would have answered the question you gave to Larry.
The president rarely can make these decisions and make them stick.
John Kennedy was the first one to try that, and you know what happened.
To John Kennedy, he was going soft on communism, and he was going soft on the military-industrial complex.
These days, the military-industrial complex and the military itself pretty much run things, okay?
And that can be bad.
It can be good.
It's good when the military finally faced up to the fact that they can't get involved in a wider war in Ukraine and told the president, look, no more long-range missile permission for strikes deep inside or 300.
300 kilometers inside Russia.
That was good.
But this time, we don't know how the military is going to react.
The last time, they slow walked Trump.
He said, I want to get out of Afghanistan.
And they disobeyed him.
And that's on the record.
I have lots of contacts that have direct access.
They slow walked.
They slow walked Biden.
And when Biden finally said, OK, I'm going to do it.
Then they sabotaged him by pulling out of the only place they could defend, Bagram Air Force Base.
And so these military, these ones that have left now, thank goodness, they can sabotage things.
It'll be interesting to see who Trump picks to be top military people as well as top intelligence people, whether they will stand on their own two feet and tell them when he's wrong or not.
Well, that would be something new.
But my hopes have been changed.
Yes, our hopes have been dashed.
Larry, is Trump stuck with the chiefs of each military staff, the chief of staff of the Army, the commander of naval operations, the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff?
He can't fire them because he doesn't like them, or can he?
He's the commander-in-chief.
He can decide who serves.
They don't have the life sinecure.
They've been confirmed by the Senate.
Do they have a tenure in office?
No.
He can pull them any time he wants.
That's what Commander-in-Chief means.
And I wouldn't be surprised to see Mark Milley reactivated, brought back in, and court-martialed.
Because he's on the record as he was insubordinate, disobeyed the lawful order, and bragged about it.
You know, so, and I've got, I've heard from several friends in the military, and they and their fellow officers are saying they want to see him brought back in and basically dragged before court and then lined up and shot.
They feel that strongly about it, what he did.
It was disgraceful.
So, no, listen, Trump, Trump's gonna, you know, he's gonna need a cleaning crew, because when he goes in first day, FBI, toss him out.
DOJ, toss them out.
CIA, toss them.
DOD, toss them.
I mean, he's got a lot of people to cut off at the top.
Let's not get fanciful about this.
Is he going to get rid of the operations part of the CIA, the part that does all these clandestine coups like the three of us would love for him to do?
Well, he won't get rid of that, but he'll just put it under the control of somebody that's going to be willing to follow presidential orders.
That's the intent.
Switching gears, Ray, you recently sat down and read everything that President Putin said recently.
I think most of it was about Ukraine.
We're going to run a little clip of him, and then I want you to expand on it.
It's a little bit difficult to understand the translator.
So the word that Putin uses in the beginning is if there is no neutrality, the way it comes out of the translator's mouth or if it's AI, the computer's mouth, it's tough to follow.
But we may play it twice if we have to.
Chris, run a cut number two twice, back to back.
If there is no neutrality, then it is difficult to imagine the existence of any good neighborly relations between Russia and Ukraine.
There is no neutrality.
Then it is difficult to imagine the existence of any good neighborly relations between Russia and Ukraine.
Is that the heart of what you saw when you read that talk?
Sure.
That simply means no NATO, no NATO membership.
They had a deal back in April, May, March, April, actually, of 2002, which included that neutrality, ceasefire.
We deal with the other more thorny issues later.
And as you know, the U.S. and the U.K. sabotaged that deal.
And Victoria Nolan, with a big smirk on her face, said, yeah, yeah, they asked for our advice, and we discouraged them from stopping the war then.
That was six weeks after the war started.
Think of the carnage, the carnage that has existed since then, not only with the Ukrainians, but with the Russian troops, young people dying because big people.
I think they have to defeat another major power.
Larry, what will it take for the deep state in the State Department, in the foreign policy field, and the elites in Europe to understand that peace will only come in Ukraine when Ukraine is truly neutral?
What will it take for them to understand it?
I guess when Putin...
At that point, they go, oh, I think this is over.
I mean, it's going to take a military defeat of Ukraine.
And with all the NATO allies pitching in, trying to help, they're going to go down with that ship.
And, you know, I wish there was a sign that they're coming to their senses.
If it was up to Viktor Orban, yeah, there would be hope.
But between the likes of Keir Starmer and Macron, They're showing no sign of wanting to let up.
Larry, I'm going to give you a chance to say something nice about a neocon.
Was Marco Rubio, whether he meant it or not, essentially correct?
Does the State Department and do the elites in Europe acknowledge to themselves, but not publicly, that it's over?
Yeah, they have to.
I can't imagine them being that stupid as to be able to ignore reality.
But, you know, I've been surprised by people who pretended to be smart in the past and weren't.
Ray McGovern, take a listen to this.
This is that character, Matt Miller, that's the spokesperson for the State Department, telling us what Tony Blinken is up to now vis-a-vis Ukraine.
It starts with a question.
And you know what the answer is going to be.
Cut number one, Chris.
Trump has been critical of Biden's system for Ukraine.
Is it true, rushing billions of dollars to Ukraine before the transition?
Yeah, we've been quite open about that, that the money that was appropriated in the supplemental, that we intend to do everything in our power to get all that deployed to Ukraine before the end of the year.
I'm sorry, before the end of the term.
There's a lot of money.
It's into the billions that Congress has appropriated.
That hasn't made its way over there yet, Ray.
And Joe Biden is going to try and put it into the pipeline?
For what?
To bribe them to leave?
To kill and slaughter more young Ukrainian men?
Go ahead, take it from there.
Well, to blame it on Trump, I mean, let's face it, the thing is a disaster.
Most of us are a little bit surprised that Putin hadn't gone still faster, and it's just weeks away from hitting the Dnieper River.
Putin has taken his time, and Biden is trying to make it seem like, well, wait a second, we gave them everything they needed.
We gave them everything they needed.
We stood by them as long as we could, and now we have this rogue regime coming in with Trump.
Let me comment on a larger issue.
You talked about, well, let me just say that the real issue here is there can be no security for any country without Mutual security for all superpowers.
John Kennedy said that in a wonderful speech of his at American University.
And now it's become, well, now it's become a real rule because the whole business about Ukraine is the Russians say we need security as well as you do.
And so the golden rule, so to speak, has become an imperative.
You have to treat others the way you would like them to treat you.
And if you're a superpower, Even Kennedy warned, okay?
He said, look, the last thing we want to have happen is for one superpower, nuclear arm, to challenge another superpower to the point where the choice is between an embarrassing or a terrible retreat or using nuclear weapons.
Now, Putin goes into that in this Valdives speech again.
He spoke for about an hour.
Some of the things he said were really pretty interesting.
One of the things he said was, you know, oh, my God, the world has been so unpredictable over the 20 years, and now it's going to be still more predictable.
What's he saying?
Well, you recall a year ago, he said, we favor predictability in the U.S. president, and that's why we favor Soto Voce.
That's why we favor, well, there's no sort of votation.
That's why we favor Biden.
And now we favor Kamala.
At the same time, he's leaving the door open.
and we're willing to talk.
And we admire Trump for surviving that ear damage, and we admire his courage, and he's really been put through the test by this deep state.
Now, to that extent, Putin is not only playing on Trump's...
Transitioning to Israel, Larry, did the Israeli Air Force seriously degrade Iranian defenses?
It's now two weeks ago, it was two Fridays ago, as Netanyahu claims, without evidence and without proof and without photos.
Yeah, I don't believe he did.
If they had, they would have been out showing the evidence much more clearly and celebrating it.
I mean, that's their nature.
They're not the ones to be quiet about it.
You know, Iran's taking its time.
You know, we always, Hollywood portrays the radical Islamists, you know, the Iranians, they'll classify them as radical Islamists, as very emotional, very ill-lawful.
I would argue it's actually just the opposite.
That the Iranians are much more calculating, measured, and figuring out what it is that we want to do.
They really are more like chess players, because chess, as I recall, I think was invented in Iran or close to it.
Whereas the Israelis are the ones who are the emotional wild men.
When you watch what Netanyahu did to Gallant over this past week, and then selecting Israel Katz to come in as defense minister, someone with really no significant military experience to justify that, but he is just a blind ideologue.
So I think we will know the answer when Iran strikes back and then Israel tries to strike back against Iran.
That if Israel easily penetrates...
Yeah, I guess they really did suppress it.
But I really don't believe that, particularly since they were saying that they were destroying S-300s when most of what Iran was fielding, I believe, was S-400 thanks to gifts that had come via the Russians.
Alistair Crook reports from his sources that the Israeli pilots were confounded.
By whatever the S-400 communicates to them, it was a system with which they were unfamiliar, and many of them turned around, and the second and third wave were cancelled.
Not only that, but the F-35 stealth fighter bombers, they were locked onto by some unknown radar.
Wow.
I feel sorry for Lockheed.
How are they going to sell this thing anymore?
With all the money that we spend, Ray, can the Russians have some system with which we are unfamiliar?
Because whatever those Israeli fighter pilots were flying came from us, did it not?
That's right.
And they have pretty much state-of-the-art.
Alistair and others have said that The big surprise was that these F-35s were locked onto by some radar that they hadn't anticipated before.
After all, they're stealth, right?
They're stealth, so they don't get locked onto.
Well, these were, okay?
So I think Larry is quite right.
Show me the photos.
Show me the photos, Netanyahu.
See how much damage you really have done.
Larry, on BB-gate, it appears that these documents were forgeries.
Nevertheless, it was classified as top secret when it was leaked to a German publication.
Netanyahu's Spokesperson was arrested.
When he made an application for bail, two things happened.
The judge looked at the documents, actually handed the documents to the judge on the bench, and he said, oh my God, this is serious damage.
He thought they were real.
Serious damage to Israeli national security.
Second interesting thing, who is the lawyer in the courtroom standing next to this character?
The third interesting thing that happened was that bail was denied.
He's still in jail.
Yeah.
No, this was a clear example of how a president, prime minister, would use intelligence to manipulate public opinion and to try to create or perpetuate a narrative.
And that's exactly what was done.
And the cynical part of it was there's zero interest on the part of Netanyahu in negotiating any kind of peace or ceasefire with the Palestinians because his true purpose was to destroy them, to eradicate them, which is what the policy has been in fact.
But this is really creating a division in Israel.
Now, I think Netanyahu has still got the majority, at least in terms of public opinion, but that may be slipping.
And the open talk that you could see, because he's also talking about Republicans.
replacing the heads of Mossad and Shin Bet.
Oh boy.
And Shin Bet's sort of the Israel's version of the FBI.
Mossad's the version of the CIA.
And if he goes after those people, then you could really see the possibility of a counter coup to remove him coming about.
Because while, Gallant and Shembet and Mossad all share the vision of getting rid of the Palestinians.
They also recognize that there are some limits to what Israel's military force can achieve.
And that Bibi is, man, he's making bets with people's lives that he's not going to be able to pay off.
Ray, is it likely that Mossad knew about this, that Bibi Gate knew that these documents were false?
We're forged.
You know, these intelligence services serve a bunch of masters.
I'm pretty sure that Netanyahu selected those in Mossad that would do this for him.
Will the rest of Mossad or the head of Mossad know about this?
I don't know, but this is a favorite tactic.
It's a great harrow in the quiver of intelligence services to use these kind of Chris just reminded me that Beebe should not be surprised that this affair is called Beebe Gate.
Apparently he spent a week at the Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C. in July.
Now we know where the Prime Minister stays.
What a world.
Gentlemen, thank you.
Thank you for the double duty as always.
It's late in the day.
It's pitch dark here in the Northeast and freezing cold, but I appreciate all you do for us.
We'll look forward to seeing you both as usual on Monday morning.
I'll be there.
Thank you, guys.
Have a great weekend.
God love you.
And on Monday, of course, our usual opening for the week.
Alistair Crook at 8 a.m., Ray McGovern at 10. Larry Johnson at 11. Have a great weekend, my dear friends.
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