All Episodes
Previous Next
Dec. 22, 2024 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
26:22
Larry Johnson : Ukraine Opts for Terrorism.
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
Today is Monday, December 23rd, 2024, Christmas week.
Larry Johnson will be here with us in just a moment on Ukraine is opting for terrorism and it just keeps coming.
But first this.
We're taught to work hard for 35 to 40 years.
Save your money, then live off your savings.
Unfortunately, there are too many threats undermining the value of our hard-earned dollars.
The Fed's massive money printing machine is shrinking your dollar's value.
Just the cost of groceries is absurd.
Let me be brutally honest.
I think the dollar is on its way to being extinct.
Not just here, but globally.
The BRICS nations, led by Russia and China, threaten to remove the dollar as the world's reserve currency.
Central banks have been shifting away from the dollar and into gold.
And if we go to central bank digital currency, that will not only destroy the dollar, but we will lose our freedom.
We will lose our privacy.
They can track anything we do.
You need to take care of yourself and your family.
So here's what you need to do.
Immerse yourself in knowledge and information.
Call my friends at Lear Capital, the leader in precious metals, investing for over 27 years.
They help me diversify into gold and silver.
They can help you, too.
Call Lear today at 800-511-4620.
800-511-4620 or go to learjudgenap.com Larry Johnson, welcome here, my dear friend.
An early Merry Christmas and an early thank you for the pleasure of all of our work together in 2024 and eagerly anticipating more of it in 2025.
You wrote a piece over the weekend from which I extracted the title of this segment.
Well, yeah.
In fact, I wrote it following the attack on Kazan because the day prior to the Kazan attack, You had another launch of attack of missiles into Kursk.
And these are all going against civilian targets.
So traditionally, when you see any kind of entity, an insurgent force or even a military, and they have to start attacking civilian targets, purely civilian targets, that have zero military significance,
that's a sign of great weakness.
No country has an unlimited supply of weapons.
No country has an unlimited supply of personnel.
So you always have to use it in the most cost-effective manner possible.
And particularly with these attackums, the United States is not going to be able to replace what Ukraine is firing.
So when Ukraine fires it and is hitting civilian facilities in Kursk, or then when they use these drones that hit...
It just represents materiel that they're not going to be able to easily replace.
And it's getting down to sort of the desperation mode on their part.
And not just them, NATO too, because there had to be U.S. and Brits on those attack on launches that were involved.
In fact, I just saw a report that two American...
Two officers were reportedly killed at one of the sites where the attackers were launched from because they were providing input to arm those weapons.
Now, I've not seen any independent confirmation from the U.S. side, but at least that's being reported on the Russian side.
Killed by Russian attacks or killed by an explosion attendant upon setting off these devices?
Russia reportedly hit him with like an Iskander missile.
Wow.
Precisely targeted.
And, you know, it's going to happen.
Joe Biden is not going to greet a flag-draped coffin at Dover Air Force Base.
Yeah.
The only way you get him there is you offer him an ice cream cone.
He might show up.
Chris, put up the photos.
Look at this, Larry.
Now, these are residential buildings.
This is almost 9-11-like with this kind of an attack on a non-military target.
What conceivable benefit is there in Zelensky's mind or whoever authorized these attacks?
To show that Putin is weak and that the Russians can't stop all the attacks, and then hope that by showing Putin is weak, they'll provoke a change in government, which is, you know, if that's their plan, you better watch out what you ask for,
because if Putin goes, you're going to have people come in that are going to be much quicker on the trigger, much slower to anger, and more likely to use nuclear weapons.
So the West is really playing with fire here.
They are continually provoking Russia.
And right now, the general staff, Putin's military, they are retaliating.
They hit Ukraine every single day with a combination of missile and drone strikes.
But they just don't get a lot of coverage in the West.
And Ukraine lies about it all the time.
Oh, yeah, we shot down 90% of the missiles.
Meanwhile, the video that do show up on social media show all the missiles getting through.
So it's just lie upon lie coming out of Ukraine.
And the danger with those lies, Judge, is that Donald Trump and Keith Kellogg believe them.
They believe the nonsense they're being told about massive Russian casualties and growing Russian weakness, as if there's a foundation.
Oh, yeah, we got the Russians right where we want them.
They'll negotiate with us now.
No, that's not going to happen.
You know, Kellogg has been saying things like the Russians suffered six times as many casualties as the Ukrainians.
I mean, does he know what he's talking about?
Where is he getting that from?
Ukraine.
That's what the Ukrainians are telling them.
There are sort of two types of human intelligence.
The preferred is where I would go out and recruit someone in another country who would give me information that I'm not supposed to have normally.
They would be doing treason.
That's the ideal thing the CIA ought to do.
Unfortunately, what the CIA is doing is they're going to this officer in Ukraine, who, you know, is their primary, their lead, he's in charge of their intelligence unit, and this guy's saying, "Hey, here's our latest document on the casualties,"
and giving it to the United States, and we take it back and reprint it as according to a knowledgeable source.
It's called liaison reporting.
And that's increasingly what the United States is relying upon.
A liaison.
People from foreign intelligence officers who are knowingly passing us garbage.
The Financial Times reports this morning that Trump's transition team has told Kiev and leaders in NATO, as inexplicable as this is, that Trump is likely to continue To supply the Ukrainian military with arms and with cash.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, it's nonsensical.
But, okay, supply them with cash, great.
Go to the House of Representatives and tell them you want another billion dollars.
Because all these Republicans who got elected because of Trump and running on the MAGA...
The concept of getting us out of needless foreign wars and stopping the flow of funds into the rat hole that is Ukraine, they're going to probably be a little perturbed.
And then we're going to supply Ukraine with weapons?
What, 155mm shells that we cannot make in any kind of capacity?
How about HIMARS?
Oops, we're out of those.
ATAKUMS?
Oops, yep, none of those.
You know, whoops, there goes another rubber tree plant.
It's just, you know, that's what he's got.
High hopes without actual having an industrial base to produce on those high hopes.
So, you know, I think it's...
You know, one of us is frozen, Larry.
He's still there.
All right, we're waiting to reconnect to Larry, who was, of course, being critical of, not of the reporting, but if the reporting is true, of decisions by former President Donald Trump to decide to resupply Ukraine because he needs authorization from the Congress.
Now, maybe there'll be something left in the pipeline that Joe Biden will not have distributed, and it'll be there for Trump to distribute as and when he sees fit.
But if he wants more equipment or more cash, then he needs to go to Congress.
And Larry's argument was Congress is not going to do it.
These Republicans got elected blasting Biden and saying that they would never do this.
I'm back.
You're back.
Good.
Good.
I was just summarizing.
Thank you, Larry.
Yeah, we lost power here for something.
It's very strange.
Okay.
You were...
We're arguing and reminding us that Trump can't do this on his own unless there's money or equipment in the pipeline on January 20th at noon that Joe Biden hasn't distributed yet.
He's got to go back to Congress, and they're never going to vote for this.
So why he would make a statement like this, I don't know.
Of course, they weren't quoting him directly.
They weren't quoting anybody.
They were saying that the transition team had leaked it.
No, that wouldn't surprise me.
I mean, you know, candidly, Trump's been saying just some crazy things the last 24 hours, talking about, oh, we're going to take back Panama, the Panama Canal, and we're going to buy Greenland, and, you know, he continues to troll Trudeau.
You have a lot of personal experience in Panama, do you not?
Yeah.
What is he talking about?
Using military force to seize and steal the canal?
Yeah, that's the only way we'd get it.
That would be an act of war, which would be unlawful, which would not be funded by the Congress.
Yeah, it's just, you know, Trump ran on this platform of needless foreign wars, and then here he is, you know, shooting his mouth off about getting us into a needless foreign war.
The Panamanians are not going to roll over and say, oh yeah, okay, you can have it back.
The Panama Canal went back to Panama after years of pressure to get it returned.
Yeah, the United States built it.
The French started it.
The United States finished it.
But the Panamanians, they own it.
And, you know, what I find fascinating is all this talk right now about, oh, the Chinese!
Chinese have been there for over 25 years.
The Chinese were up to their armpits in Panama back then.
Part of the reason is, at the north end of Panama sits the city of Cologne, the Cologne Free Trade Zone.
Back then, 25 years ago, it was the second largest free trade zone in the world, number one being Hong Kong.
Merchant area is a walled city and nothing but banks and wholesale retailers.
Everything you can imagine, Samsung, Verizon, Sunbeam, Black& Decker, Under Armour, Nike, everything.
Clothes, consumer items.
It's all wholesale and people come from Mexico, Central America, South America, the Caribbean to buy it.
Then they have it shipped back to their country in a container, you know, a 40-foot shipping container, and then they sell it in their own country.
Well, it's this enormous area, and most of the products that are coming in there come out of Asia.
Large number come out of China.
And Vietnam and Malaysia and Indonesia.
What is Trump's complaint about the canal?
He said they're ripping us off.
I mean, do they charge American ships any more than they charge other ships to use the canal?
Not to my knowledge, but maybe they have an extra fee for military ships transiting.
The canal, they've had some problems.
There's been a drought in Panama, and so they've had problems keeping the water level actually up throughout the canal.
But it is, you know, and some ships get bigger, you know, the canal was built for a certain size of vessels, and sometimes there are certain ships that may not be able to transit.
But, you know, what Trump's talking about is complaining about the price.
You know, the Chinese had won bids, and they run, there's not one big port.
You've got like three separate ports.
There in Cologne, on the big sides that, you know, take off the big 40-foot containers, you know, the things they stack on board ships.
Right.
And, you know, you've got at least three major ports like that.
And, you know, the Chinese manage those.
They run them.
I was doing some, you know, we actually did a compliance program for one of the casinos in Panama City.
And this is, oh, 20-plus years ago.
Their biggest customers are Chinese who come in and gambling their money.
You know, so the Chinese have been there for quite a while.
I recall George H.W. Bush invading Panama just to arrest Manuel Noriega, who, when George H.W. Bush was the director of the CIA, was one of his assets.
Yes.
Yeah.
And we, listen, I saw that whole, so I left CIA end of September of 1989 and moved down to State Department.
In the preceding year and a half, the CIA was working frantically to try to provoke Noriega into doing something that would justify us attacking him.
Because one of the analysts that sat at the desk next to me, a lady, that was her job.
She had the Panama account.
And so, man, she was busy because she kept getting briefed on what the CIA was up to.
So we started in like 1987.
Again, we turned on Noriega.
It was no longer useful to us.
But then we were literally trying to create the conditions to go to war.
And then finally we did.
And in the process, you know, I wrote about this last night at sonar21.com.
We were investigating product cigarette smuggling.
This one port is used specifically by Colombians to smuggle things out of Panama into Colombia through a port called Rio Acha.
And I started talking to this one woman.
And, you know, she was initially a little hostile and then, you know, she became a little more conversant.
But it turned out, when we invaded in 1989, U.S. soldiers, they killed two of her children.
Not directly, you know, they didn't go in and say, we're looking here to kill your kids.
But they did kill the children through, you know, they were collateral damage, as they call it.
It wasn't collateral damage to her.
And that's the thing that just infuriates me when I hear Trump talk about this with no regard for human life.
I mean, damn it.
Here's the president of Panama responding to the president-elect's rant.
The canal is not controlled directly or indirectly by China, the European community, the United States, or any other power.
As a Panamanian, I reject any statement that misrepresents this reality.
The canal will continue to be in Panamanian hands as the patrimony of our nation and guaranteeing its use for the peaceful and uninterrupted transit of ships of all nations.
Well, look, Trump ranted about this during his first presidency at one point and on Greenland.
I mean, at one point he wanted to trade, as if this was a game of risk, he wanted to trade Greenland for Puerto Rico.
I mean, that stuff is demeaning to the people that live there and, of course, is ludicrous.
But let's get back to Ukraine.
How much longer can Ukraine possibly last?
If we can't give them artillery shells, and if they're engaging in acts of desperation, like attacking civilians 500 miles east of Moscow and assassinating a general on the street in broad daylight.
I'm terrible at these predictions.
I thought they'd be over by now.
Yeah, we all did.
You know, it will be, even if the United States continues to pump some money in, the manpower issue is past the critical point.
Just in the last 24 hours, Russia's reporting that it killed almost 400 Ukrainians, mostly up in the Kursk area.
You know, you start, you know, multiplying that out over a week.
You're killing 400 a day.
You know, that's 2,800 a week.
Larry, is the occupation of Kyrsk by Ukrainian troops and foreign mercenaries, some of whom we have reason to believe are Americans, still going on?
Yeah, yeah.
Well, they're being shrunk.
They're in a collapsing pocket is probably the best way to describe it.
So, yeah, no, Russia's still...
Killing Ukrainians there, and they're killing them in the Donbass.
The latest city to fall, Kurokova, it was left largely intact.
So this is like the second or third time in the last three, four months that you've had a fairly significant-sized city fall to the Russians, and the Ukrainians haven't tried to destroy it in the process.
They get out as quickly as they can.
Once Pokrovsk falls, then the ability of Ukraine to hang on to anything in the nets is going to be questionable.
I think they're trying as desperately as they can, maybe hang on, Trump will come in and perhaps change things.
That's what they're counting on.
But when you listen to Zelensky, he's more desperate every day.
Because he's saying crazier and crazier things because he recognizes Trump's not his friend like Joe Biden was.
Well, Larry, listen to this.
He actually claimed yesterday, Sunday, that Ukraine can bring assets to NATO if it joins.
Cut number seven.
Allies need to know what Ukraine can bring to NATO.
And how this membership in the alliance would stabilize global relations.
Alliance for Ukraine is achievable, but it is achievable only if we fight for this decision.
Nobody in their right mind can take that man seriously, can they?
Did he ever enunciate exactly what it is that Ukraine's going to bring other than some bags of dollars that he got from the United States to maybe buy off other European politicians?
Ukraine?
You know, Ukraine's natural mineral wealth, which was one of the critical resources that could have made Ukraine strong, are now under the control of the Russians.
The significant portion of those resources, the oil, the gas, the rare earth minerals that Lindsey Graham lusts after, the gold, the coal, that's all in the Donbass.
And so there's a reason you go back.
Go back a hundred years.
At the time, the Russians had the expression about the Donbass being the heart.
It's the heart of Russia.
Here's Secretary Blinken repeating as recently as late last week, Putin has failed.
Cut number six.
If this gets to a place where there is a ceasefire.
And it's a ceasefire that's on just and durable terms.
That would be a good thing.
But for it to be durable, there has to be some kind of assurance that Russia's not simply going to rest, refit, and reattack in a year, two years, five years.
That's going to be critical.
If we get that, Ukraine is on a path to success.
It's a country that is standing strongly.
It's an independent country.
It was not erased from the map.
That's what Putin wanted to do.
He's failed.
It can stand strongly on its own feet, militarily, economically, democratically.
That's the best possible rebuke to Putin, and I know President Trump will want to get a good deal going forward.
Well, I guess it's his one last shot to perpetrate the propaganda he's been perpetrating for the past nearly four years now.
Well, it goes to the heart of the, you know, as long as people keep talking past each other and keep getting bad information, you know, if Blinken really believes that Putin's goal was to take Kiev in three days.
He wasn't listening to Putin.
That's not what Putin said.
Never said that.
Nobody on the Russian side ever said that.
They always made it very clear.
Our goal is to demilitarize and denazify Ukraine.
And part of that demilitarization means no membership in NATO.
You know, I know there's some speculation that Trump can offer the Russians a deal.
Hey, we'll put a moratorium.
We'll wait.
We're not going to do anything on NATO.
We'll let that go down the road a ways.
And that Russia would foolishly get involved with that?
Are you kidding?
They've seen enough of the lies of the West.
The unilateral abrogation of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty by George W. Bush.
The abrogation of the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Agreement by Donald Trump.
The lies surrounding Minsk 1 and Minsk 2 by Angela Merkel and Francois Hollande of France.
You know, Russia, there's no international rules-based order.
It's a lie.
It's a complete fraud of the West.
And I think the Russians, at least Putin and Lavrov, the foreign minister, they've awakened to this reality.
They can't trust us.
Larry, thank you very much, my dear friend.
Great analysis, as always.
Thank you for all the work you've given to us in 2024.
We'll be closing down shop tomorrow until the day after New Year's.
But we'll look forward to working with you again in the new year.
Thank you, my dear friend.
Happy to be in the boat, Roy, and Merry Christmas to you and your team.
Thank you.
And to your family.
Thank you, Larry.
Coming up later today at 12 noon, Pepe Escobar and at 3 this afternoon, the always worth waiting for, Max Blumenthal.
Justin Napolitano for Judging Freedom.
▲
Export Selection