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Jan. 24, 2025 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
29:53
INTEL Roundtable w/ Johnson & McGovern : Weekly Wrap
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Hi, everyone.
Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
Today is Friday, January 24th.
Sorry, I was looking over the calendar.
Friday, January 24th, 2025.
It's the end of the day, the end of the week, a very busy week for all of us.
It's my favorite time.
It's our Intelligence Community Roundtable with Ray McGovern and Larry Johnson.
Gentlemen, welcome here.
I want to start with a clip of President Trump.
Lastly, sir, we have an executive order ordering the declassification of files relating to the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, and Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
That's a big one, huh?
A lot of people are waiting for this for a long, for years, for decades.
And everything will be revealed.
Okay. Give that to RFK Jr.
Yes, sir.
I praise the president for what he did, but I'm not so sure he's correct, Ray McGovern, that everything will be revealed.
What are the chances?
That the files are still intact after all these years.
We'll start with JFK.
We can talk about RFK and MLK later, but JFK is the one we want to principally focus on.
What is the chance that it's still intact?
George, the first thing I need to say is we don't need any more documents.
We've got them up the kazoo, as we used to say in the Bronx, okay?
But these documents could be very helpful if they're unadulterated.
I would have to be naive to think that 60 years, since 60 years, those documents still exist in the pristine, pure way that they may have existed in the beginning.
Any of that is in doubtful.
Documents have a way of lying or misleading.
But there is the chance that this time Trump feels as As much in command as he did not feel in his first term, and he has ordered this, and of course JFK's nephew, RFK, has appealed for him to do this.
There's no reason all these years after the assassination not to do this.
Despite Bill Burns saying, oh no, sources and methods would be compromised as recently as a few years ago when he became head of the CIA.
So I'm looking for not only backstories, but other people to be implicated not only in the assassination, but suffice it to say, in the cover-up of the assassination.
And I know that I happen to work for...
One of those guys.
His name is Jani.
Fred Jani is what he went by.
He was one of my first supervisors when I came into the agency as an analyst in 1964.
And his son has written a book about his father, knowing about the cover-up, which included James Angleton.
Richard Helms, all the likely suspects.
The cover-up, because it was indicated it was part of the murder of Mary Pinshot Meyer on the CNO Tothpath, and he's written this incredible book about it.
I think I've advertised it before, Mary's Mosaic, and it's going to be a film if the CIA and the deep state is not able to prevent it from becoming a film.
Larry, what would you look for in these files?
I mean, what do you think is there?
If there was a conspiracy to assassinate him, and then a conspiracy to cover it up, and then a conspiracy to cover up the cover-up, conspirators don't usually leave tracks, do they?
Well, they might.
I mean, remember, you know, the Nazis in World War II documented everything with respect to the death camps in Poland.
Which they tried to destroy at the end of the war, but failed.
You know, look, I have a buddy who has actually seen the CIA documents, and, you know, he says that there's something there.
I would just, I think we'd be better advised to tell people to lower their expectations.
And I don't know what Ray's experience was when he first went into the CIA, but I remember mine was, oh my God, we're...
We're going to get to now see classified information, top secret information.
It was like you're at the carnival and you're told, hey, you're going into this tent and you're going to see the bearded lady.
And you get inside the tent and you find out it's just a big hairy guy to put a dress on.
You're going, is that it?
You remember me recounting the conversation I had with Trump, which was almost four years ago to the day.
It was January of 21 when he called me about pardons because I knew some of the people being pardoned.
And I said, remember you made a promise it's not too late to keep.
What? What?
I'll do it now.
The JFK file.
Then he lowered his voice and said, if they showed you what they showed me, you wouldn't release it either.
And then I said, who's they and what they show you?
And he said, someday when we're together and there aren't 15 people on the phone conversation, I'll let you know.
What do you think he could have been referring to, Larry?
Well, I think one possibility, Ryan Dawson's done an excellent video on this.
It's an hour and a half long.
It could implicate Israel.
At the time, because a month before Kennedy's assassination, Robert F. Kennedy sent a letter to the Zionist Organization of America, which was a predecessor for AIPAC, informing them that they were going to be required to register as foreign agents.
They didn't like that.
Kennedy was also authorizing the CIA to expand its investigation of the theft of uranium from Pennsylvania that had been used to construct Israel's first illegal nuclear weapon.
At the Mona.
So then there are the ties, established ties, between the Jewish mafia at the time, Meyer Lansky, and the Italian mob, who both had incentives in terms of what the Kennedys did in Cuba.
And Robert F. Kennedy's own campaign going after organized crime.
So that's a possibility.
I mean, the case that Ryan lays out is very, it's well documented.
It's not, you know, off the wall.
But there's lots of people with lots of motives.
We can go down, you know, other potential conspiracies.
But that's the point.
Let's get the actual evidence, put it out there.
Maybe it's something pretty pedestrian but embarrassing.
Maybe it does directly implicate the CIA itself in having killed Kennedy.
Ray, am I naive or would we know if documents have been destroyed?
I don't think we'd know, Judge.
But I'd like to connect some dots.
Go ahead.
When I say there's enough evidence already, if you read this book and you're not persuaded, Why he was killed and how he was killed, well, you just haven't read it closely enough.
Why do I read this now?
Because James Douglas has just completed another book, okay?
And it covers how the assassinations not only of JFK and RFK and MLK happened, but also Malcolm X. Now, connecting dots, you remember, Judge, two weeks ago, I made a big thing of MKUltra and the incredible assembly of documents from FOIA requests that the National Security Archives has released about six
weeks ago completely unnoticed.
Well, guess what?
I hope that I'm not stealing James Douglas's thunder, but he told me two days ago MKUltra played a role in all.
Larry, other things that are happening as we speak.
Is the CIA...
Painfully aware of its failures in Ukraine and trying to burnish its image by repeating nonsense that the New York Times and the Washington Post and the President of the United States are picking up.
Well, this is two different things.
So on the one hand, the CIA is lying.
We've now got irrefutable evidence that the CIA is lying to Donald Trump.
That they are passing on intelligence that's derived from the government of Ukraine.
And that is with respect to the number of Russian casualties, which Trump put at, yesterday he said almost a million, but he used the number 700,000 dead.
Now, that number was used by current CIA director Bill Burns, being quoted by David Ignatius just a week ago.
Well, he practically Burns' stenographer.
Yes, Ignatius is the CIA stenographer, unpaid maybe, but nonetheless is a preferred journalist, so-called journalist of choice.
But Burns in there is quoted as saying, yeah, our analysts assess that 700,000 Russians.
So right there we know that that's what the CIA is telling Trump.
And I guarantee the CIA is also telling Trump that the Russian economy is in tatters, that it's on the edge.
So they have fed Trump false information.
Trump has believed it.
And people say, well, Trump's a fool for believing him.
No, because imagine what would happen if Trump came out in public and said, no, I'm completely rejecting the CIA briefing.
Well, then the CIA would be leaking.
Trump's ignoring the intelligence.
That's how this damn game is played.
But the point is, right now, Trump is being misled, and he's given two sets of assumptions about Russia that are completely false, and he's going to try to use those to pressure.
Now, the CIA, for its part, has launched a public relations campaign, and they've used a variety of news outlets.
The most recent one was ABC, in which they're basically taking credit for Oh, we weren't involved with Ukraine until this Ukrainian intelligence officer gave himself up to us and gave us all these secret Russian documents.
And then, by God, we were all in.
But then they dumped the guy.
But the CIA stepped up its involvement.
And they admit, they admit in this ABC piece that the CIA was actively involved in planning and helping the Ukrainians carry out terrorist attacks inside Russia.
But then this piece, it's like written by Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, because the very last three paragraphs talk about making fun of Vladimir Putin for believing that the CIA was behind this war in Ukraine.
And you're going, the entire preceding damn article is all about CIA involvement in Ukraine.
Of course Putin was right.
But this is the CIA.
They recognize the game is over.
And they're basically trying to say, man, we did everything in our power.
We did great work.
It was wonderful.
Not our fault.
It's the Ukrainians' fault.
Ray, I want you to weigh in on this.
But first, I want to play Trump mouthing what they have fed him.
Cut number 13. President Zelensky would like to have peace.
He's told me that very strongly.
He'd like to have peace.
But it takes two to tango.
We'll see what happens.
Any time they want, I'll meet.
I'd like to see that end.
Millions of people are being killed, and they're being killed.
It's a vicious situation, and they're now largely soldiers.
A lot of people have been killed in the cities.
They look like demolition sites.
The thing with Ukraine is that many more people died than you're reporting.
You're not reporting the real numbers, and I'm not blaming you for that.
I'm blaming...
I'm blaming maybe our government for not wanting to release those numbers.
Many more people died than what you know about.
I don't know if he knows what he's talking about.
Do you largely attribute this war, Ray McGovern, to Bill Burns?
No, Bill Burns is not strong enough to do this.
He's a windsock.
When he heard what...
Biden wanted to do.
He said, oh, yeah, how can I help you?
Well, Bill, you said back in 2008 that this would provoke the Russians now that they've done it.
Please say it was unprovoked.
Oh, it was unprovoked.
Is that good enough, Mr. President?
You know, I have nothing but, well, I won't even say it.
Now, with respect to Trump, Now, he said Arschloch, okay?
That's a German word for a guy who can't be dependent on the hill of the truth, okay?
So it's really hard to figure out what he's doing here.
But one conspiratorial, one sinister explanation for why Trump goes ahead with these ridiculous numbers of 700,000 or a million Russians killed or put out of action, okay, and this business about the Russian economy failing.
It's because he has in mind a month from now saying, who are you guys that told me that stupid stuff?
That's not the case at all.
You're all fired.
He's real good about that.
You're all fired.
So that's one possible interpretation.
The big thing is the Russians are not playing this dumb stuff that Trump says.
Today, breaking news, Trump said, you know, the election in 20, not Trump said, Putin said.
The election in 2020 was stolen from Donald Trump, and if that hadn't happened, there would be no war in Ukraine.
Whoa! Did Putin say that today?
Putin said that today, yeah.
No, you can't get that.
You have to tune into, guess what, RT.
Well, that should be banner headlines in American media that Putin made a statement like that.
That'll certainly endure him to Donald Trump saying something like that.
Wow. That's exactly right.
And that's what he's trying to do.
And he's saying, in effect, I'm waiting for a call from Donald Trump.
And until that happens, Putin is quite capable of ignoring all this stupid stuff that's being said and heeding the stuff that, yeah, I want to talk.
Yeah, I want to resolve this.
So we'll see what happens, but certainly...
Putin has said some gratuitous things in support of Donald Trump.
Not least of all was how strong he was in escaping that bullet and coming up and saying, you know, I'm well and I'm saved and I'm going to save the rest of you.
Judge, let me just jump in because one other thing here.
So we got the public Donald Trump is negotiating bombast.
Putin's going to do what I tell him to do.
Now let's look at what Trump is actually doing.
In one of his executive orders, he froze all, emphasized all, foreign aid for 90 days.
That means all the foreign aid that goes to Ukraine, frozen.
No more headed.
Without the cash to run their government and the munitions with which to resist the Russians.
We're going to find out.
Because not only has that stopped, but then Trump got rid of the U.S. military officers and their staff and the civilian contractors that were at the Pentagon managing the flow of all this aid and weaponry.
That's frozen.
It's also contingent upon an audit being done.
So this is actually maybe a very clever way of Trump to pull the plug on the Ukrainian operation.
Larry, who is lying to Trump?
Because I don't think John Ratcliffe is in office yet, although he was sworn in yesterday.
Tulsi Gabbard hasn't been confirmed yet.
Are these career people taking charge in the absence of a confirmed director lying to him?
Absolutely. They were under Bill Burns' control until noon on January 20th.
So those briefings that were coming in, this is actually under the Director of National Intelligence, the DNI, because the PDB brief...
As I understand it, was moved out of CIA headquarters and to the DNI.
So that is the province of the DNI.
They've been lying.
You're talking about the president's daily briefing will not be given to him by the director of the CIA, but by the director's nominal boss, the director of national intelligence, who, if Trump gets his way, will be Tulsi Gabbard.
Tulsi Gabbard, yeah, which would be great.
Tulsi Smart, she'd go down and do the brief every day.
But the point in this, Judge, is that you've also got around Trump staff members, Kellogg, Sebastian Gorka, Michael Waltz, who actually believe this nonsense as well.
There's not a critical thinker in the crowd that's able to say, hey, wait a second, we've got some objective open source information from people like MediaZona that show that this is just nonsense.
It's a lie.
Wow. The full screen that Chris just posted.
You want to put it up again, please, Chris?
That's from PBS.
We have to give them credit for it.
And it says, in an interview, Putin echoes Trump's claim that conflict in Ukraine could have been avoided had he been in office.
This is a tremendous, in my view, tremendously newsworthy statement that doesn't seem to have gotten to first base.
I have to play this for you, Larry, because I thought of it when I first heard it.
You're going to be angry at me.
This is a person who claims he has Trump's ear.
If that's true...
God have mercy on us.
Chris, cut number four.
This war will never end with Hamas in charge of Gaza politically or militarily.
Their days are numbered.
And the next question for the world is what do we do about the Iran nuclear program?
That's where we're going to move to next.
There's diplomacy.
There's a one trillion chance you'll degrade the Iranian nuclear program through Yeah.
Diplomacy, there's a 90% chance you'll degrade it through military action by Israel supported by the United States.
So the next topic I will be engaging in with President Trump is to take this moment in time to decimate the Iran nuclear program because they're so exposed.
What does that mean?
Help Israel deliver a knockout blow.
What does that mean?
You're going to urge him to have Israel bomb Iran's facilities that are underground and would require U.S. military support to actually be effective?
I'm going to urge the decimation of the Iranian nuclear program.
I don't think diplomacy works.
This is a religious Nazi regime.
They want to destroy the Jewish state.
They want to purify Islam and drive us out of the Mideast.
It would be like negotiating with Hitler.
I am hoping there will be an effort by Israel to decimate the Iran nuclear program supported by the United States.
And if we don't do that, it will be a historical mistake.
I know he's a madman, Larry, but he plays golf with the president and they get to talk with nobody else there.
Well, let's hope that on the next golf outing, Trump uses a seven iron on him off the tee box.
You know, it was just, look, I have a bold prediction to make.
Before the year is out, Trump will have opened negotiations with the Iranians and will be on his way to negotiating the Trump.
Let me just say that there are two positive indicators here.
One is that whether he forgot what he's supposed to do or whether he just decided to tell the truth on his way out, Bill Burns did say two weeks ago That Iran is not working on a nuclear weapon and has not worked on a nuclear weapon since 2003.
That's 18 years, okay?
And so there's no reason now to justify an Israeli or a U.S. attack on Iran.
I hated to say the last part, but it's logic, okay?
The other thing is that there's a treaty now between Russia...
It is not a mutual defense treaty, but in my view, it is everything short of that.
Okay, what does that mean?
That means that Russia is on Iran's side.
Iran is part of the BRICS.
If the Israelis and a foolish Trump, which is quite in his nature, decides to support the Israelis on an attack on Iran.
Israel will be in part destroyed by Iranian hypersonic missiles, and it will all be proven in the washout that there was no work on a nuclear weapon as opposed to the nuclear, you know, fissile material of the uranium that needs to be refined to a high degree to accommodate such a missile.
So there are those two things, and I think that, in my view, the prospect of an attack on Iran Even if Netanyahu decides to go ahead and try to do it himself and mousetrap Trump in, I think Trump is pretty smart enough to avoid himself being mousetrapped into that kind of situation.
And I dare say I think Netanyahu is aware that Trump is smart enough to do precisely that.
I got to play one more clip before we call it a week.
Senator Chris Van Hollen, I probably don't agree with him on many things, but I agree with him on this.
This is his interrogation of Elise Stefanik.
And during the course of this interrogation, this lady is like a female Lindsey Graham.
This lady acknowledges her view that God the Father gave greater Israel to the Jewish people.
3,500 years ago, and that is a valid basis for their claim to geographical dominance today.
You won't believe it, but here it is.
Cut number 16. I asked you in my office also about whether Palestinians have the right of self-determination.
My understanding was you said yes.
You have a different answer today.
That was not the direct question that we discussed.
I said the Palestinian people...
You believe the Palestinians have the right of self-determination?
I believe the Palestinian people deserve so much better than the failures that they've had from terrorist leadership.
We agree on that.
It's just a pretty simple question.
And I believe we need peace in the region.
Of course they deserve human rights.
So... I want to ensure that, number one, we bring the hostages home.
So do all of us.
Representative Stefanik, let me just ask you.
I have 30 seconds left.
I'm rarely surprised by answers in my office, but I did ask you whether you subscribe to the views of Finance Minister Smotrich.
Of who?
I'm sorry, Finance?
Smotrich. This is the Israeli Finance Minister Smotrich and the former National Security Minister Ben-Gavir, who believe that Israel has a biblical right to the entire West Bank.
And in that conversation, you told me that, yes, you shared that view.
Is that your view today?
Yes. Okay.
I think when it comes to this very difficult issue, if the president is going to succeed at bringing peace and stability to the Middle East, we're going to have to look at the UN Security Council resolutions, not just the ones on Lebanon,
which we should enforce, but other UN Security Council resolutions.
And it's going to be very difficult to achieve that if you continue to hold...
The view that you just expressed, which is a view that was not held by the founders of the State of Israel, who were secular Zionists, not religious Zionists.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
We have to add another fanatic to the Mike Waltz, Sebastian Gorka, General Kellogg Coterie.
Huckabee, don't forget Mike Huckabee.
All right, Huckabee the same.
With whom Donald Trump surrounds himself, Larry.
Yeah. No, listen, this kind of Christian Zionism that, you know, frankly is based upon a dubious source.
You've got to recognize that that portion of the Old Testament that was written by Jewish scholars who were under captivity in the Babylonian Empire.
That they may have had a little incentive to slant the story in their direction.
Just saying.
It wasn't like God himself sat down with a dictaphone or an iPhone and dictated the language.
And so this is how ludicrous this is.
There is a funny video out of this Italian woman that shows up at a home in Bath, England, knocks on the door, and basically tells the guy, Hey!
I'm taking your house over because we were here in the 13th century or whatever.
They were doing the equivalent of what the European Jews did to the Palestinians.
Larry is de-emphasizing the role that God played in founding town and country realty.
We all know that God is a real estate agent.
And in Deuteronomy 15.4, he said, you shall have this land at your disposal.
That's only the first half of Deuteronomy 15.4.
The rest is, so that there shall be no poor among you.
So even Hebrew scriptures, it's kind of a deal, like you could call it a covenant.
You can have this land so that there shall be no dispossessed poor.
How far will it come from that in the first place?
If you believe God was a real estate agent and you believe Deuteronomy 15.4 can be interpreted just by the first half, well, you're not being honest with yourself.
You ought to read the whole thing.
And of course, we all know the devil can quote scripture to suit his purposes.
Gentlemen, thank you very much.
Another great, great conversation.
They go by like that.
I appreciate very much the double duty.
Look forward to seeing you both at your usual times on Monday morning.
It's about 5 degrees here in northern New Jersey.
I trust it's warmer where you both are.
Thank God, yes, here it is.
All the best.
Have a great weekend.
Thank you, Josh.
And we will see you Monday morning with Alistair Crook at 8 o'clock and Ray at 10 and Larry at 11.30.
And probably one or two others in the afternoon.
Judge Napolitano for judging freedom.
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