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Jan. 2, 2025 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
27:43
INTEL Roundtable w/ Johnson & McGovern
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Hi there, everyone.
Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
Today is Friday, January 3rd, 2025.
Happy New Year to you.
It's the end of the day, the end of the week.
It's the best time of the week.
From my perspective, it's time for the Intelligence Community Roundtable with my dear friends, colleagues, and collaborators, Larry Johnson and Ray McGovern.
Gentlemen, welcome here.
Always a pleasure.
I know you each have specific items you want to talk about, and I want to probe your thoughts on them.
But first, just some general questions, if I may, because the three of us have not been together in a little while due to the end-of-the-year holidays.
Larry, I want to ask you about Russia today, in January 2025, how it is economically...
Domestically, politically, culturally, its perception of itself.
Is it stronger today after resisting the Biden sanctions, or is it weaker?
Is it optimistic about the future with respect to Ukraine and what Putin has done, or is it pessimistic?
It's grown up.
It is independent.
You know, three years ago, at the start of the special military operation, you could still find a segment within Russia.
That believed that, oh my God, how can we live without the West?
How can we live without them?
How can we survive?
And now what they've discovered over the last three years is we don't need them.
It's almost like the survivor of an abusive spouse, someone who's been subjected to abuse repeatedly, and they stay in the relationship almost out of codependence.
Then once they get free and realize, my God, I can stand on my own two feet.
Not only can I stand on my own two feet, but I'm making more money than that person.
I'm stronger than that person.
And you know what?
I'm happier without that person in my life.
So I think across the board, whether we're talking economically, socially, culturally, or militarily, Russia is much stronger today than it was three years ago.
And Donald Trump and company better pay attention because, unfortunately, much of the U.S. intelligence community still pretends that Russia is some shriveled-up creature that needs to be treated with condescension and disrespect.
And that's not the case now.
Do you think he's going to get true and honest intelligence reports?
And, Ray, I'll ask you the same question, but since you raised it, Larry, whether it's through John Ratcliffe, a former I have little confidence that they're going to tell him the truth because I'm not sure they're keen on learning the
truth themselves.
They've been content.
They've been lazy.
To accept information given to them by the Ukrainians and accept it as face value and pass it on as if it's factual when it's not.
So until such time as Tulsi Gabbard, hopefully, gets in, lays out the expectations, I want the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, and if you fail to give it to me, you're fired, then all of a sudden people might get motivated and start doing their job.
But up to this point, no.
Ray, I ask you the same questions I asked Larry, but about Israel.
How is it economically?
How is it politically?
Is the demise of Syria really that much of a boon to Israel, or should they be careful what they have asked for?
My view is that for the nonce, that is, for the next several months, this is a real boon for Israel.
It has to be recognized as that.
Over the longer term, it's going to fall apart.
And those same rebels, whether they're moderate rebels or whether they're terrorist rebels, will tear the country apart.
And unless Israel can keep its portion of Syria apart from these rebels, it's going to run into trouble because there'll be bedlam there.
So far, Israel has really liked chaos in Syria.
Because in that respect, there's no threat to Israel.
And they have said so at the highest level.
Right now, all bets are off.
I don't know what's going to happen a year from now.
But over the longer run, there are so many people ticked off at Israel in that area that I think that they'll coalesce in some manner better than they have so far.
And Israel will be under increased threat rather than relatively less threat, which I perceive to be the case now.
The three of us have not been together for two weeks.
In the two-week period, there seems to have been more news about Donald Trump and Joe Biden and these horrible things that have happened in the U.S. and less about Israel.
Is Israel still slaughtering babies, still killing children in Gaza?
Yeah, it is, Judge.
Newborn babies are freezing to death.
Infants right out of the womb.
Five of them so far identified.
You know, this is the season where in the Judeo-Christian, actually Abrahamic tradition, we mark what we call the slaughter of the holy innocents.
The story is simply that when Herod heard that there was a threat to his regime by this person who might pretend to be King of the Jews, which was what Herod was, he slaughtered or he had slaughtered all men babies,
all males under the age of two.
Now, that has some historical background, unlike some of the other stories in the Bible.
You know, there's a poem written about the children in Gaza.
With your indulgence, Judge, I...
I'd like to read it.
It's very brief.
I haven't committed it.
Well, I've committed it to heart, but not to memory.
It's very brief.
May I read that?
Yes, go ahead, Ray, please.
It's written by a British poet named Michael Rosen, and it was banned from all circulation in Israel, and you'll see why.
Don't mention the children.
Here it is.
Don't mention the children.
Don't name the dead children.
The people must not know the names of the dead children.
The names of the children must be hidden.
The children must be nameless.
The children must leave this world having no names.
No one must know the names of the dead children.
No one must say the names of the dead children.
No one must even think that the children have names.
People must understand that it would be dangerous to know the names of the children.
The people have to be protected from knowing the names of the children.
The names of the children could spread like wildfire.
The people would not be safe if they knew the names of the children.
Don't name the children.
Don't name the dead children.
Don't remember the dead children.
Don't even think of the dead children.
Don't say dead children.
Okay. If I feel strongly about that, you will have noticed that.
But I think we have to say dead children because I think humanity identifies with helpless, unprotected children.
And there is a group, Doctors Against Genocide in Gaza.
It has been worked very, very hard.
I'm connected with them, and I applaud what they're doing.
They're mostly American-Palestinian by birth or by heritage.
Don't mention the children.
Well, we have to mention the children because people identify with what human people should neglect in doing what they're doing.
That was beautiful and thoughtful, Ray.
I don't know this Michael Rosen.
One of the viewers referred to him as The United Kingdom's Max Blumenthal.
Quite a comparison.
Larry, will Trump continue to give Netanyahu everything he wants?
Is this slaughter going to continue?
Maybe. And here's why I say maybe.
Trump's biggest desire is to be liked and not to be shunned, not to be isolated.
And if he begins to understand...
That by virtue of having uncritical support for Israel, he's going to find himself shunned and isolated within the Arab world, within the Muslim world.
Then I think you could see Trump actually say, oh, wait a second.
We're going to have to find a different path forward.
At least this is one of those situations where you hope his narcissism is so great and that these other, the leaders of Saudi Arabia and other places make it very clear to Trump that If you continue to be a facilitator of genocide, we're not going to have anything to do with you.
At that point, that might wake Trump up.
And no matter how many ardent Zionists are around him, Christian Zionists, he may say, wait a second, we've got to bring an end to this Kelly.
Because the slaughter of the innocents in Gaza.
In stark contrast to the Israeli lie that Hamas beheaded 40 babies.
We don't have any names for those babies, not because we're afraid to name them.
It's because it was a fabrication by Israel, complete fabrication.
Whereas we can come up with about 12,000 names of these children that are dead, murdered by the Israelis.
They have real names, and they are genuine casualties.
Larry, I want to switch gears with you in light of the slaughter on Bourbon Street in New Orleans.
The FBI is receiving some rare praise.
Is the FBI worthy of belief?
Is the FBI worthy under our constitutional system of existence?
Yeah. FBI, in my view, ought to be disbanded.
We need to start over.
You can't trust a single thing they say anymore, unfortunately.
And that's a consequence of all the lies that they've openly told and professed, the crimes that they've committed.
Over the last years, starting with the complete fabrication of this fantasy that Russia was meddling in our internal election and that Trump was elected by the Russian.
And then, you know, they followed that up with building and trapping Michael Flynn into claiming that he told a lie when he didn't tell a lie.
But nonetheless, they used that to go after and prosecute an honest man.
And then beyond that, you go to the Hunter Biden laptop.
Which they buried.
They hid that evidence.
Then they planted informants in the January 6th crowd.
And then they lied, not on one, not on two, but on four different FISA warrants.
Lied before a federal judge and paid no cost.
So, you know, right now, when they come out and say, nothing to see here, folks, move along.
This is just a lone actor.
You know, maybe they're telling the truth.
But, you know, I think there's some other issues out there that ought to be looked into that raise some questions.
And how is it that this Shamsha Din Jabbar, the one who ran over people in his truck and then got out and was shot and killed while firing a weapon, at least that's what's alleged.
He was in the U.S. Army, but he was a human resources guy who then did IT work.
He was a computer geek.
He had maybe calluses on his fingertips from typing.
But he had no training to speak of with firearms.
Whatever he got in basic training was it.
But this guy built two improvised explosive devices that were capable of being detonated remotely?
Where the hell did he learn that?
That's not...
You don't pick that up by reading the terrorist cookbook online.
Who built those for him?
Where did he get the money for it?
Where did he get the knowledge, and how did he build them without blowing himself up?
Now, maybe he did it, but it's highly, highly unlikely, based upon my experience with explosives.
I mean, I only had a week of training at CIA, and I learned enough to be a danger to myself.
Yeah, I would chime in here, Judge, if I may.
Of course, Ray.
You know, the two most important appointments are Kash Patel to be head of the FBI and Tulsi Gabbard to be director of national intelligence.
Let's talk about Kash Patel.
He was a federal prosecutor.
He worked in the House Intelligence Committee.
He knows where the bodies are buried.
He knows all about Russiagate, who started it, like Sullivan and Blinken, who continued it.
He knows all the skeletons here.
That's why they've resurrected 100-year-old William Webster, who is head of the FBI as well as the CIA, and put words in his mouth that's saying, oh, Kash Patel would be really terrible, and so would Tulsi Garber.
They don't stop at any lengths.
You're not exaggerating.
I didn't even know he's still alive.
He's got to be very close to 100 years old.
No, he is 100 years old.
He is.
And they did the same thing to Jimmy Carter when he was 95, getting him to say that Trump really lost the election in 2016 and Russiagate was so dangerous and so real.
I'm in the cynicism of this group.
To put words into it.
It's elder abuse, for God's sake, to do this.
Talk to William Webster.
See if he's still able to conduct the conversation.
Larry, yesterday, Trump called on the CIA.
Wait, I'm back, Judge.
So there's one of my exceptional performance awards.
You can see who signed it in your lower right-hand corner.
That'd be William Webster.
Wow, what's the date, Larry?
1986. So we're looking at 29 years ago.
He signed my commendation when I retired.
He was famous most in the agency for having played really good tennis with luminaries downtown when he should have done his job.
Larry, Donald Trump in, I think, an overreaction to the events in the slaughter on Bourbon Street.
He blamed it on people who were illegally present, even though the guy that supposedly did it was born in Texas, and then said, I need the CIA to help me.
Now, the charter of the CIA expressly prohibits it from engaging in intelligence activities in the United States.
We know that that's honored in the breach.
Right. But how should we read the president-elect saying, I need the CIA to help me?
Is he falling for the deep state nonsense?
Is he unaware of his 60,000-person domestic spies called the NSA?
Does he really think the CIA would help him solve a murder mystery?
Well, the CIA could be implicated in this in several ways.
Number one, let's take Jabbar down the new ISIS guy.
Well, the CIA has been working closely with ISIS over the last several years in trying to overthrow Bashar al-Assad.
In fact, you could make the case, you know, I said it tongue-in-cheek, but the reason Jabbar carried out this terrorist attack is he was upset that he didn't get named to be the new president of Syria like al-Jawani.
The former head.
Al-Jawani, remember, was not only the senior guy in ISIS, reportedly number two at one point, but he also was the head of al-Nusra.
Al-Nusra was the one that carried out the chemical weapons attacks that were attributed to the government of Syria in 2013.
And then here's al-Jawani, who's got a $10 million bounty on his head just three weeks ago, and the State Department goes, ah, never mind.
And they take it away.
And now all of a sudden, here we get Jabbar, who's, quote, ISIS.
Except you've got to wonder how much of this evidence was planted.
Because he's carrying an ISIS flag, but he has it on upside down.
He didn't even know how to read Arabic.
And the first reporter that's allowed into his home there in New Orleans is an ardent Zionist with strong connections to Israel.
She's the only one.
Yeah, that's just a coincidence.
Or the other estimate of the CIA here is this Matt Live Iceberg, the fellow that blew up the Tesla out in Las Vegas.
His actual duty station was in Panzerkassern.
Panzerkassern is a U.S. military base just outside of Stuttgart between the villages, towns of Sindelfingen and Boblingen.
I've been there multiple times.
It's the place of the 10th group.
And what does the 10th group do?
Well, he was supposedly doing drone operations in Ukraine.
I guarantee you, if he's doing drone operations in Ukraine, he's working with the SBU, and he's working with the CIA as well.
Now, you've got to ask, why does a guy like that come back to the United States and decide to blow himself up?
Out in front of the Trump Tower.
And again, unlike Jabbar, who had not a single shred of training in building sophisticated explosives, here you've got an 18-year veteran of Special Forces, a Green Beret, who absolutely knows how to build sophisticated explosives,
and he puts together what I'd call a clown show of explosives in the back of his car, fireworks and gasoline.
Are you suggesting that he was murdered?
I don't know.
I don't know.
Because they're saying, and this is the other part, he shot himself with a Desert Eagle.
Now, Desert Eagle is an Israeli.50 caliber semi-automatic handgun.
.50 caliber?
.50 caliber.
It has such a kick.
I've got a friend who's 6'5", big guy.
He was firing it once.
He fired it.
Boom! Hit himself in the forehead with it.
Okay? It has that much kick.
And it has a heavy trigger pull.
So, you know, thinking a guy's sitting there trying to do a heavy trigger pull with a gun like that.
Just lots of suspicious questions that need to be answered that this guy just suddenly goes off the deep end.
Yeah, maybe it was related to a marriage.
Maybe it was post-traumatic stress syndrome.
But again, this shows the damage that the FBI has done to this country.
In my view, more damage than any terrorist group.
Because what they've done is they undermined our ability to believe anything that the FBI says without assuming that they're lying, they're deceiving, and maybe they're manufacturing a crime.
Well, Ray, you and I have talked about this many times.
The intelligence community and law enforcement in America since 9-11, so now we're 23 years ago, has all come of age told to...
Get the evidence first.
Worry about the Fourth Amendment afterwards.
A whole generation of FBI agents, DEA agents, whoever gathers evidence in America has been instructed to trash the Constitution and let the federal prosecutors deal with it.
That's where we are today.
Well, the evidence of that, of course, is in these multi-agency focus groups or whatever they call them, which are centers now.
Where the CIA and the FBI are cheek by jowl and the old discrimination between operating abroad and operating domestically has been sort of dissipated.
This is big.
What do they call them, Larry?
These are gel centers where they all get together and...
Fusion centers.
Yeah, right.
Fusion centers, okay?
So when you get violations of the FISA, well, that's small potatoes now.
That's being violated every day of the week, as well as looking at or listening to conversations.
So NSA, of course, you rightly point out, should be part of the mix here.
But when Trump comes in this time, if he comes in with Kash Patel and Tulsi Gabbard, he will not be as naive as he was eight years ago.
He'll be able to say, look, this is what's going to happen.
You guys tell me what's really going on, and I want to know what the FBI is doing, Cash.
I want to know who killed Seth Rich.
If you don't know that already, Cash, you can find it out.
I want to know that.
I want to know who killed JFK.
You know, the president-elect personally promised me.
Well, he said it many times in public, but he and I had these conversations in private, so I'm the least involved here.
But face-to-face said to me, I will release those files.
And then said to me, well, if they showed you what they showed me, you wouldn't release them either.
And I said, who's the they and what did they show you?
And he said sometime when we're not on a phone call and raised his voice being listened to by 15 other people, because he was calling me from the Oval Office.
I'll tell you.
I wonder if he'll follow through on that maybe on January 21st.
Well, the biggie is RFK Jr.
I mean, his dad was killed.
His dad was killed by the same people who killed RFK and turned the whole world around.
I saw it happen.
I didn't see the assassination, but I was there working for John Kennedy at the time.
The whole paradigm changed, okay?
So if RFK Jr. has any influence on Trump, I think he might be the guy to gin up his courage and say, look, most of these guys are dead anyway.
I'm going to release these files, and the institution will suffer, and the institution has every right to suffer because it should be abolished.
While he's at it, we're really on a roll here, my friends.
While he's at it...
He should release the 9-11 files, the files that wouldn't show to Tom Kane's commission.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, you know, again, that was part of the Saudi protection program.
Right. Most importantly.
And it may very well show that Israel actually had foreknowledge that the attack was going to take place, but kept quiet and didn't warn us, simply because they calculated that the collapse of the towers would finally inspire America to go out and take out revenge on...
Countries like Iraq, which had nothing to do with 9-11.
You're talking about the Israelis that were on a rooftop in Jersey City across the Hudson River who were rejoicing when the World Trade Towers came down.
Yeah, there are some that have tried to say, oh, they did it.
That's why they were dancing.
I said, no, they were dancing because they knew what it meant in terms of getting the United States to be more pliant.
And doing Israel's bidding in the Middle East.
And we've done so much to our detriment and the detriment of the people of the Middle East.
Gentlemen. Gentlemen, please.
Go ahead.
Go ahead, Ray.
Don't mention the Israelis.
You're not supposed to do that, okay?
This is a Defense Science Board conclusion.
After looking at all the stuff that happened at 9-11 and after and before, they said, quote, Muslims don't hate our freedom.
They hate our policies.
The overwhelming majority voice objects to what they see as one-sided support in favor of Israel against Palestinian rights, and the longstanding, even increasing support for what Muslims collectively see as tyrannies,
Egypt, Saudi Arabia, South Jordan, Pakistan, Gulf states.
When American public diplomacy talks about bringing democracy to Islamic societies, this is seen as no more than self-serving hypocrisy.
Defense Science Board.
Did the New York Times print that?
They were forced to print it two months later, and they omitted the part about Israel.
Can you imagine?
They actually excised that sentence from the rest of the paragraph.
So, please, don't mention Israel's role.
Don't mention the fact that...
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed bragged about doing this because of his hate for the policies and the U.S. endorsement of the policies of Israel.
Gentlemen, I almost forgot how much enjoyment the three of us have getting together on Friday afternoons!
Enjoyment? I don't know.
No matter what we're talking about, we speak our minds and I think the viewers will very much appreciate it.
Thank you very much, guys.
As always, look forward to seeing you both on Monday morning at your usual times.
We're back to our old routine, I hope and expect.
Have a great weekend.
All the best.
You too, Judge.
You're welcome, Judge.
Thank you.
Coming up on Judging Freedom, the always worth waiting for, for once he's waiting for us, Max Blumenthal, Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom.
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