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Nov. 15, 2024 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
27:22
COL. Lawrence Wilkerson : Trump and the Defense Department
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Hello, everyone.
Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
Today is Friday, November 15, 2024.
Colonel Larry Wilkerson joins us now.
Colonel, I'm delighted to see you.
I wish you were earlier in the week, and I didn't have to wait until it's dark out on a Friday afternoon to get to spend time with you.
But welcome here, sir, and thank you very much for your time.
In our world, it's been a tumultuous week in terms of the intent John Ratcliffe, to run the CAA, he's not going to dismantle the operations side.
He's probably going to goose it up, right?
That'd be my guess.
And I'm really interested in this appointment from the perspective of what Trump said earlier, that the CIA director would not darken his door.
He wants to empower the DNI, and of course that's one way to do it.
I frankly would recommend that, that the DNI be the only person regularly exposed to the president.
But that means Ratcliffe is going to have a very shadowy existence.
Maybe he prefers that.
Tulsi Gabbard.
Is she in a position to undo, dial back, restrain, whatever you want to call it, the old boys club, who are accustomed to special operations of coups and secret wars and all of those horrible things they've been doing since 1947?
Well, I watched Avril Haines and I was not very impressed, nor was I impressed with the woman we took out of the secret prisons whose name, thank God, escapes me right now and made director of the CIA.
So I'm not down on women, but...
You can imagine why her own colleagues gave her that nickname, but go ahead, Colonel.
Gina Haspel.
You're right.
remembering now.
I negotiated I've negotiated.
I talk with She didn't tell me how she was going to vote when I left, but I was very impressed that she was studying it so assiduously.
So I have a good opinion of her, but some of the things she said since, particularly with regard to Israel, troubled me.
She's right in Mike Huckabee's camp on Israel.
I don't know where she is on Ukraine or how she feels about Iran.
She, of course, condemned Donald Trump for ordering the murder of General Qasiman Soleimani.
I don't know if she still feels that way.
So she's been on both sides of a lot of these issues.
Is she a political hack that speaks to please her masters to advance herself?
Or is she someone who will bring the CIA or the intelligence community to where President Harry Truman intended it to be, which is spying and not disrupting other governments?
Generally speaking, when you get someone that inexperienced, it takes a long time to figure out who's playing tricks on you.
And by that time, they've played the tricks, and maybe you're in trouble.
I've seen political hacks go in from the Congress, like Porter Goss, for example, and just make an absolute disaster of themselves in the role.
And Porter, of course, had much more time on the block than Tulsi does.
So I'd be worried about that with her.
You, I believe, were Chief of Staff to Secretary Powell when this DNI office came into existence.
Yes.
I remember I was a lone wolf at Fox.
In fact, my guest at the time, now you're talking, what, 25 years ago, was Larry Johnson.
And he and I, much to the chagrin of Fox management, were arguing on air, advancing the argument on air, we were agreeing, that DNI was superfluous and would ultimately be toothless.
Just like online security.
Right, exactly.
Exactly.
I wouldn't have appointed Christy Noem there.
would have appointed somebody to shut it down.
But anyway, does Tulsi Gabbard have the authority to say, no, you're not going to overthrow...
Maduro in Venezuela or whatever that character's name in Nicaragua is.
Does she have the authority to say to John Ratcliffe, no?
She does, but they haven't fixed the problem.
And if you studied it and you sound like you did, you know what the problem is.
The problem is no people power and no money power.
Correct.
How big is her group?
How many people work for her compared to the number of people that work for Ratcliffe?
Well, you would be surprised there.
I toured their facility when they first were created and they had about 5,000 on the books.
So you never, never create a government bureaucracy and not think they will be people mightily very shortly thereafter.
Does she have...
I'm sure the answer to this is no, but don't let me put words in your mouth.
Because she has no experience as far as I know.
Does she have the understanding from whatever source to talk them out of what they want to do?
Does she have the personal courage to say the answer is no?
Will she be the exclusive briefer of the President of the United States?
Or will John Ratcliffe, who is actually close to Donald Trump, Find his way into the Oval Office.
That's what I'm going to watch, to see if Trump lives up to that, keeps only the DNI in there.
That would be a major empowerment of the DNI, if he were the one.
And also the principal intelligence official at formal National Security Council's meetings, and even at principal's meetings.
That would be a real empowerment of that position.
Were Trump to do that, then the answer to your question might be a little tending towards affirmative rather than negative.
She might be able to do those kinds of things.
Switching over to Mike Huckabee.
Now, the ambassador is really just an ambassador.
It's not a policymaking position.
And I know this will rattle you no end, and I'm sorry to do this to you on a Friday afternoon.
Here's a montage of the worst of Mike Huckabee.
Cut number four.
Basically, there really is no such thing as, I have to be careful in saying this, because people really get it.
There's really no such thing as a Palestinian.
There's no other thing.
That's been a political tool to try to force land away from Israel.
The two-state solution, if we mean two governments holding the same piece of real estate, is irrational and unworkable.
If there is a two-state solution, the Palestinian state needs to be outside the boundaries of the nation of Israel.
There's plenty of land in the world that we could find a place and say, okay, let's create a Palestinian state.
There are certain words I refuse to use.
There is no such thing as a West Bank.
It's Judea and Samaria.
There's no such thing as a settlement.
Their communities, their neighborhoods, their cities.
There's no such thing as an occupation.
That's the last part is particularly odd in light of the Israelis themselves and the United Nations, Israeli generals, the United Nations and the International Criminal Court referring to it as an occupation.
You know darn well everybody that observes this knows it.
I mean, if remarks like that are indicative of the way he feels, he's Bebe's right-hand man.
He won't be our ambassador.
He'll be Bebe's right-hand man vis-a-vis the United States, which is not uncommon for the people we send to Israel.
Is that the way Donald Trump feels?
I hope not.
But the indication there would be, I've said this repeatedly over the last few days as these names have come out, I do not think that a single one of the principal cabinet officers or reasonable facsimiles thereof, such as the DNI, will be in place 12 months from the time he appoints them.
Can I tell you who agrees with you?
I hope he doesn't mind me saying it on air.
He told me this privately.
Colonel McGregor.
Agrees with you 100% on that.
He said 6 to 9 to 12 months, these characters, if they're even confirmed, we'll get to the characters in a minute.
Now, here's somebody that doesn't need a job.
Senator John Thune, who was just elected the majority leader in the Senate.
He's the leader of the Republicans in the Senate.
Colonel Wilkerson, can you take a guess to whom he made his first phone call?
After he was elected majority leader, it was not Donald Trump.
It was not J.D. Vance.
It was not Joe Biden.
It was not Chuck Schumer.
Bibi Netanyahu.
Interesting.
It tells you where we are, Colonel.
I wonder if Senator Thune can spell the word genocide.
I wonder if almost two-thirds of the Congress could.
That's disgusting.
You would think they couldn't.
They're the ones that Thun was there, gave Netanyahu those wild standing ovations when he pointed out you.
I almost wish he had mentioned you by name because you were out there with all these young kids demonstrating in the streets.
And so was the former Chief Command Master Sergeant of the Air Force.
Correct.
Correct.
You know, we laugh because you need a sense of humor to get through the day, particularly dark days like this.
But Tulsi Gabbard is an ardent Zionist.
Mike Huckabee is an ardent Zionist.
Oh, wait till you hear the nominee to be Secretary of Defense.
Trying to find the right one, Chris.
Here it is.
Cut number 10. Anyone that wants to take the stage and talk about dual loyalty is dead wrong.
What this organization represents, what Western civilization represents today, is an understanding that Zionism and Americanism are the front lines of Western civilization and freedom in our world today.
And what better time for that relationship?
From the scrapping of the terrible Iran deal to the embassy move, the recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of the Jewish state, and the recognition of the Golan Heights, this president is a true friend of the state of Israel.
It is an eternal bond, an unbreakable bond, that represents faith, And freedom and fidelity to historic, religious, and cultural traditions.
The opposite of secularism and Islamism and anti-Semitism.
All right, this goes on and on and on.
First of all, how will the Pentagon react to this person as their boss?
Then we'll talk about whether or not you think it could even be confirmed.
Well, I have to say, first of all, Judge, that there are so many people who don't know anything about history.
Every time the Crusaders came to Jerusalem, the Crusaders were defeated eventually.
And that's what he is.
That's what he is.
He's a Christian Crusader allied with the Jews.
The Pentagon is probably right now sweating bullets.
With the idea that this 44-year-old Princeton, Harvard special guy with the tats on his arm is coming over there to, as he has said, as I understand it, clean house.
There are so many things that need to be done at the Pentagon.
Cleaning house is not one of them.
I would get rid of some of the flags, no question about it, some of the admirals and generals, and I would shake things up a bit.
Much the way Dick Cheney did when he first came in as Secretary of Defense with Powell and was a pretty good Secretary of Defense.
He fired the Chief of Staff of the Air Force just to make sure everyone knew that the civilian was in charge.
Thank you very much.
Powell couldn't even talk him out of that firing.
But this is absurd what I'm hearing from him.
And the biggest problem with the Pentagon, Judge, is they can't pass an audit.
They lose.
Twenty to thirty billion dollars of the taxpayers' money every year by their own admission, and they can't pass an audit.
That's a huge problem that's just draining money away.
And along with these wars in support of Israel, for example, it's draining money away at an alarming rate.
And Trump's going to find that out when he gets into office again and finds out just how deeply we are in debt.
With no administrative or managerial experience, can you even make the argument that a person with no administrative or managerial experience can manage a budget of $860 billion and a team of human beings numbering close to $3 million?
I'm talking about military and civilian.
The largest not-for-profit organization on the face of the earth.
And this guy's going to manage it.
No way he's going to do that.
He can cause chaos.
He can cause a drop in morale that's so significant that people do begin to abandon him.
But I don't think he can manage it.
And I would say of the people Trump is appointing, he'll be one of the first to depart.
Do you have a feel, Colonel, for how serious life...
Commissioned officers feel.
Not necessarily admirals and generals, but colonels, lieutenant colonels, guys that have been there for 20 years or so and have a great feel for the military and a love of the country.
How do they feel when somebody like this, instead of Doug McGregor?
I'll be honest.
One of the greatest people on the planet for this job.
Pete Hegseth gets it.
Yeah, either Pete or Doug.
Doug, you and I know, and we could feel fairly confident that he would take a studied, analytical, and decent professional approach to it.
If Pete were to do that, if Hegseth were to do that, and ally himself with the lieutenant colonels and colonels, you know, not formally, but informally.
Who are disgusted with a lot of the leadership in the Pentagon because they see them as just people waiting until they can go work for Lockheed for a seven-figure salary.
Then that would be a powerful movement.
It would be a powerful movement that would eventually clean out a lot of the dead meat in the Pentagon, just as George Marshall had to in 39 and 40, clean the dead meat out of the U.S. military because they'd been there for so long they didn't know what war was all about.
That'd be good, but I don't see this guy doing that.
He's a rabble-rouser.
He's a radical.
Just look at his dress and the tats on his arms.
Look at where he worked and what he did when he was there and what he said when he was there at Fox.
I've been looking at some of his interviews.
Well, in one of those interviews, I don't want to overburden you with running tapes.
This is while Trump was president.
He advises Trump to bomb civilian targets in Tehran.
If Trump called up the Secretary of Defense and said, destroy Tehran's infrastructure, I would think the Secretary of Defense would show up in a heartbeat with a team of people and argue, here are the natural and probable consequences if that happens.
Pete will say, when do you want it done, sir?
I hope not, but I fear you're right.
I mean, you need strategic reasoning.
You need management skills.
You need to be able to listen.
You need to have empathy.
You need to articulate policy.
It's very articulate.
He can articulate policy.
But the other attributes of leadership at that level, I'm not sure that he has it.
Unless, unless, Colonel, the real break, Judge, on us attacking Iran has been the Pentagon.
Well, unless, Colonel, I'm just getting breaking news from the Washington Post.
Trump team rethinking Pentagon pick after receiving details of past sexual assault claim.
I was going to bring that up, but I got it on my list.
Yeah, I didn't want to bring it up.
I've been married three times.
I'm an old curmudgeon.
I'm a curmudgeon.
I was married 55 years very happily.
He's been married three times in one quarter of that time.
Yes.
You're not a curmudgeon.
You're a great man because I never kissed a curmudgeon, but I did kiss a great man.
The public knows I kissed you on the top of your head.
Now I don't remember where I was before this thing came up.
Let's go to Marco Rubio.
Well, we already talked about Rubio.
We talked about Hegseth.
Is Donald Trump a neocon?
He gives every appearance of being so from time to time.
And so do a lot of the people he's appointing.
And some of them are, in fact, certified neocons.
I mean...
He's like Lindsey Graham.
Bomb Iran and Zionism triumphant.
Rubio is a neocon.
He's apparently changed his mind on Ukraine, but he was a champion of Ukraine when Biden was sending hundreds of billions of dollars there, and he's very pro-Zionist.
Tulsi Gabbard has changed her mind.
She's pro Zionist.
I don't know where John Radcliffe.
I know Donald Trump well and personally and have known him for many years.
He called me many, many times during his first tour of duty in the White House.
He sounds and gives the impression of being...
We're hearing that on one of these lists, and you probably know this fellow as a deputy to Tulsi Gabbard, General Mike Flynn.
Oh, yes, I know him.
That's a disaster.
Tulsi and Flynn would be at loggerheads immediately.
No question in my mind about that.
What would they be at loggerheads over if she's his boss?
Just about everything, including the fact she is his voice.
She.
All right, Colonel, where do we go from here?
I guess we just wait and watch and see what happens.
Are we going to be in World War III?
It very well could be, and it could be a step that Trump doesn't want to take at all.
And I feel like that much I intuit about him.
He doesn't like war.
And he doesn't want war.
He speaks that way sometimes, but he really doesn't like it.
Can I tell you who's very happy, notwithstanding his own domestic issues, Bibi Netanyahu?
I'm sure.
I mean, he believes.
You tell me if you think this belief is well-grounded, Colonel, that he'll get even more!
I don't know how that could be.
Joe Biden gave them everything.
Big deal.
They held up 2,000-pound bombs for 30 days.
Of course, they made sure they had enough 2,000-pound bombs, 2,000-pound bombs to last the 30 days before they symbolically held them up.
Beebe seems to think that Donald Trump will give him more and faster than what Joe Biden gave him.
Is that a rational belief?
I think so.
And I also think that they won't do things like Biden did, even though Biden didn't enforce it at all.
You know, they were supposed to be up by November the 8th.
I think they were supposed to be up to 350 truckloads of food a day.
They aren't even close.
So that was a political act par excellence.
It didn't have anything to do with reality or caring for the Palestinian dying of hunger.
Trump will probably reinforce that, I would suspect.
And I know Huckabee will be.
Recommending those sorts of things to him.
So I don't know that Netanyahu has any fear now except the fact that he's losing.
He is losing, Judge.
He is losing on almost every front.
Hamas is replenishing its ranks from people coming from Jordan and Egypt and elsewhere.
There are probably as many Hamas fighters in Gaza right now as were there on October the 8th.
He's losing, Judge.
Wow.
Does the Israeli public know that, Colonel?
It's seeping through to some of them, but not very many of them.
Haaretz is about the only paper that really puts the truth out from time to time.
Sheldon Adelson bought up all the press around Tel Aviv, which is the principal population center, despite Jerusalem being moved.
He bought up all the press and sold it to Netanyahu.
Other things like that constantly tell lies.
Let me ask you the $64,000 question.
If Bibi attacks Tehran and Trump and Hegseth give him military support, will the Russians get involved?
If we come in whole hog with him, which I think we will have to because he can't do it by himself.
He proved that on the, quote, 100 plane strike, unquote.
Right.
Yes.
And I wouldn't be surprised to see China there either.
What is China's interest in that area?
Very significant interest.
Much of their oil, unlike us, comes through the strait.
What can you tell us about the break in diplomatic relations between Israel and Turkey?
What are the likely ramifications of that?
I think it's long overdue.
I think Erdogan just tap danced all over the place trying to keep the Muslim population in his own country, you know, thinking he was going to do something about it.
And then finally, he's been getting vibes from that population that, hey, you talk a great show, but you don't do much.
And I'm waiting to see if Chehan...
You cut their oil off, you really hurt them.
Colonel Wilkerson, a pleasure, my dear friend.
No matter what we talk about, it's your instinct, your courage, your precision.
It's a joy for me to be able to pick your brain.
Chief Fritz was busy this week.
Imagine that, he's too busy for me.
I want Fritz and me and you to share a cell.
I'd rather share a bottle of wine than a cell.
Maybe we'll do you and Dennis together.
Does he live anywhere near you?
Not too far.
We have breakfast every now and then together about nine in the morning.
All right.
Colonel, thank you very much.
We look forward to seeing you next week.
It's a real pleasure.
Take care.
Of course.
And next week, we will have all of your regulars starting on Monday morning with Ray McGovern at 10, excuse me, with Alistair Crook at 8 Eastern Time, Ray McGovern at 10, Larry Johnson at 11, and hopefully one of our heavyweights in the afternoon.
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