All Episodes
Previous Next
March 24, 2025 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
25:00
Larry Johnson : What Witkoff Doesn't Know.
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
Today is Monday, March 24th, 2025.
Larry Johnson will be here with us in just a moment on just what does the President's Chief Negotiator, Steve Witkoff, not understand about Gaza and about Ukraine?
And some fascinating observations Larry has about the JFK assassination.
But first this.
Markets are at an all-time high.
Euphoria has set in.
The economy seems unstoppable.
But the last administration has buried us so deep in debt and deficits, it's going to take a lot of digging to get us out of this hole.
Are you prepared?
Lear Capital specializes in helping people like me and you Grow and protect our wealth with gold.
Did you know that during Trump's last presidency, gold rose 54% to a record high?
If that happens again, that puts gold at $4,200 an ounce.
Don't wait.
Do what I did.
Call Lear at 800-511-4620 or go to learjudgenap.com for your free gold ownership kit and special report $4,200 gold ahead.
When you call, ask how you can also get up to $15,000 in bonus gold with a qualifying purchase.
Call 800-511-4620 800-511-4620 or go to learjudgenap.com Larry, welcome here, my friend.
Thank you very much for joining us.
You have two fascinating pieces at Sonar 21, your website.
One is about Steve Witkoff, the president's chief negotiator.
And the other are your observations on the Kennedy assassination.
Amplified, if you will, a little bit, I think.
By the documents that were just released and by documents that still haven't been released.
We'll get to the JFK assassination in a minute.
Is Witkoff perceived as a neutral and credible negotiator by Hamas and by the Russians when he works for a guy who's slaughtering Hamas or attempting to paying for it?
And who's financing the war against the Russians?
Well, with respect to Hamas, absolutely not.
In fact, he conceded it's remarkable the contrast that he presented in that interview with Tucker.
Because on the one hand, when he's talking about the Russians, oh, we need to have communication.
Both sides need to be talking.
We need to talk to each other.
With Hamas?
No, I haven't talked to them directly.
I'm not dealing with them.
They're monsters.
We go through the Qataris.
How could Hamas trust him?
He is so fully ensnared in the Zionist fables and propaganda that he's in their position entirely.
So, you know, there's no objective.
With respect to the Russians, the Russians are glad that they've got a guy who's got direct contact with Trump, who's known to have Trump's ear, that is at least willing to listen to them, willing to treat them with some measure of respect.
But that said, and I don't have a...
I think he's a decent man.
I think he's smart.
But with respect to Russia, he's ignorant.
He does not know the history.
He does not really, but at least he understands up to a point how critical Russia's demands are.
But again, failing to understand the history, if he understood the fact that Going back over the last 40 years, the United States has been constantly applying sanctions on Russia.
They did it under the Jackson-Vanick Amendment in the 70s and 80s and then backed off.
Then the Majinsky Act in the 2000s and then backed off.
And then again at the start of the special military operation and continue to up sanctions.
And then with respect to international agreements.
George Bush walks away from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty Agreement.
The United States doesn't do anything to help uphold Minsk 1 or Minsk 2, which are sabotaged by the Ukrainians.
And then the United States directly intervenes to blow up the negotiations in Turkey and Istanbul in March of 2022.
And then Donald Trump walks away from the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Agreement.
And he arms the Ukrainians.
You got that history.
And man, Russia's looking at that saying, you know, what is the basis for relationship here?
The United States has been nothing but continually hostile to us for the last 50 years.
We're willing to give it a run, but we're going to require some solid proof.
And that's what I don't think with cough grass.
Does he have the ability to perceive the gravity of the slaughter in Gaza?
Because the number, according to the Gazan Health Ministry over the weekend, surpassed 50,000.
Now, that's 50,000 dead bodies.
There's probably a lot more people dead because they haven't found...
The number doesn't seem to phase anymore, Larry.
It certainly doesn't phase the Israelis.
It certainly doesn't phase the IDF.
I wonder if it phases him or he's just part of the Zionist mentality, as you said, the Zionist fable that surrounds Trump to a person, including Tulsi Gabbard, regrettably.
And all they want to do is Netanyahu's bidding.
It makes me wonder.
How a person like that can even be a negotiator.
I mean, he is as one son as Tony Blinken.
But he's alluded to the fact that the loss of his son from suicide in, I think, 2011.
His son named Andrew died of an Oxycontin overdose.
But that really affected him.
And you would think that somebody that has experienced that kind of loss would be capable.
Of employing some empathy.
But he has no empathy towards the Palestinians.
No understanding.
He has adopted completely the Israeli mythology that Hamas is some irredeemable terrorist organization that is just killing Jews because they hate Jews.
No, that's not what's going on.
Hamas is the National Liberation Movement.
They're fighting much the same way that my ancestors fought to expel the Brits from what was in the colonial America and became the United States.
They're fighting to ask what they view as foreign occupiers.
Well, Witkowski doesn't grasp that.
He takes entirely the Zionist perspective in this and really seems incapable of having any kind of empathy.
Towards what the Palestinians are experiencing.
They need to disarm.
That's his prescription.
And that's the Trump administration's demand.
That Hamas, quote, demilitarize.
Yeah. Give up your guns.
Give up the only thing that's protecting you from being completely wiped out by Israel.
Right. They're not going to do that.
And he doesn't seem to capture or grasp that.
I recognize that this is not the Dr. Phil show, but where does this leave Marco Rubio?
Oh, Rubio's not a player in this.
He's a spectator.
He does what he's told.
You know, he is the organ grinder monkey with Trump playing the organ.
You know, cranks the organ, he dances.
He's not setting policy.
He's not able to say, you know, this is what we're going to pursue.
And, you know, again, this really has nothing even to do...
The bigger target in here is Iran.
That's who they're going after.
The Trump administration believes that if they can take out Iran, it will solve all the problems in Israel, in Gaza, in the West Bank, in Syria, in Egypt.
It'll settle because Iran's big problem is under their formulation of the problem.
I'm going to run a clip from Mike Waltz, one of his many rants over the weekend about Iran.
And then I'm going to ask you if Iran poses a threat to the national security of the United States.
Chris, cut number eight.
We've seen the death and destruction that they're doing through its proxies between Hezbollah, the Assad regime, the Houthis and what have you.
If they had nuclear weapons, the entire Middle East would explode in an arms race.
That is completely unacceptable to our national security.
I won't get into what the back and forth has been, but Iran is in the worst place it has been from its own national security since 1979.
Thanks to Hezbollah, Hamas, the Assad regime, and its own air defenses being taken out by the Israelis.
Have the Israelis taken out their air defenses?
Hasn't the Kremlin sent them sophisticated air defenses?
Well, what was shocking and alarming is not just what Walt said, it's what Whitcoff also said.
And Jack Keene, I believe, reiterated, made the same point on Fox over the weekend, that Iran has been stripped naked of its air defense.
That's their assumption.
That's the working assumption for Trump, for Witkoff, for Waltz.
Apparently, that's what the intelligence community is telling them.
My understanding is they're dead wrong.
And Alistair Crook would support me on that.
That Iran, in fact, has a robust, intact air defense system.
It fought off the first attack.
By the joint U.S.-Israel attack on October 27th.
And this is what's so dangerous, Judge.
The fact that these guys believed their own nonsense, their own horse manure, that they are operating under this premise that Iran's wide open, all they got to go in there is just use some force, bomb them, and they're going to turn around.
That, you know, we bombed Iraq.
And Iraq didn't have even a fraction of the defense assets that Iran has.
And we failed there, ultimately.
So the misinformation that's put out, you know, they talk about the massive violence of Hamas.
Prior to October 7th, Hamas was responsible in a 24-year period for killing a grand total of 1,575 Israelis or foreigners who were in Israel as tourists.
Now, 1,575 over 24 years, that's not exactly mass murder.
And yet, in a period of 16, 17 months, Israel's murdered over 50,000.
Palestinians with over 17,000 children.
So I don't want to hear from people like Walt about how violent Hezbollah and Hamas are when the actual violence that's being perpetrated is being done by Israel.
And again, they blame Iran for the violence.
We can go back and look at the number of attacks that have been carried out inside Iran by U.S.-funded terrorist groups.
The Mech, the Mujahideen al-Khalq is one of those groups that the United States has funded, trained, and helped carry out such attacks.
And then let's not forget the role of the United States in helping arm and fund Iraq and its attack on Iran in the 1980s.
So the United States needs to recognize that it's not playing with clean hands here.
It's not pristine and without guilt.
We've got blood on our hands.
And the only way to get out of this is to step away from the killing and supporting this kind of mayhem and then try to negotiate a deal.
But, you know, candidly, I don't think the United States is sincere about negotiating a deal with Iran.
If the Israelis attack Iran and the United States openly and notoriously aids in that attack, what do you expect the Kremlin will do?
Well, the Kremlin has already signed.
On January 17th, this security arrangement with Israel.
Now, while they didn't pledge to offer what you call a mutual defense pledge outright, in that agreement they state that they will come to Iran's assistance under the terms of Article 51 of the United Nations.
So if Iran is in fact attacked, then Russia is going to come to their assistance.
This could completely...
If the United States goes through with this attack on Iran, it will completely derail any negotiations between the United States and Russia, number one.
Number two, the Iranians will retaliate.
They retain the capability to launch missiles that will devastate U.S. military facilities in the region.
Potentially, if Iran's oil facilities are attacked, they will wipe out Saudi Arabia's.
There will be a worldwide oil crisis, and they will definitely hit Israel to inflict damage on Israel that it hasn't experienced before.
This could get out of control real quick.
And yet, Donald Trump and his team, and Trump unfortunately deliberately surrounded himself with weak people like Rubio, like Hegseth, like Waltz.
They're young guys.
They're all about, they're believing a lot of the nonsense that they've been fed over the years.
They're not thinking about this critically.
You know, for example, when Trump decided, okay, ordered the bombing in Yemen, a mature, experienced Secretary of Defense, which is not Pete Hegseth.
Before you do this, you need to understand, we only have a limited number of air defense missiles that we can put on board these ships.
And given the number, the capacity of the Houthis to launch missiles and drones at us, We could really completely and rapidly exhaust our supply and leave our ships completely vulnerable.
Do you understand that?
And Trump probably said, well, no, I thought we had everything.
So that may have changed it.
But no, Hank Seth didn't do that.
It was, yeah, I'll put on his cheerleader uniform.
You and Ray have schooled me being acquired from assets in the field.
And yet by the time it gets to the White House, it's spun because they want to tell the White House, Is Trump getting accurate intel about the state of nuclear...
Bill Burns, Ray said this three times this morning.
In his last two days in office as the director of the CIA, repeated his understanding, Iran is nowhere near having offensive nuclear weapons.
Now, I don't know if the CIA is still maintaining that posture, but what happens in that case is if...
If they are, then Trump ignores them because it doesn't fit in with his worldview.
I'm not sure the CIA or the Defense Intelligence Agency necessarily weighed in and said, look, if you pursue a bombing campaign against Yemen, it's not likely to succeed because that doesn't appear to be the case.
And unfortunately, what we've heard out of Tulsi Gabbard, those of us...
Who held high hopes for us.
They've been extremely disappointed because she sold out to the Zionist lobby and has repeated a lot of the tropes and memes that portray Hamas and the Houthis as this ruthless terrorist organization.
They're not.
The Houthis, in fact, are the only ones standing up trying to defend those unarmed civilians that are being murdered.
Switching gears, Larry, has the government revealed all the documents it has on the JFK assassination, or did it still hold back?
I think it's still holding back, but what they did reveal, once you start digging into it, despite those who claim, oh, this is a nothing burger, there's nothing to see here, people like Ben Shapiro.
The reality is it's very important.
There was a book written several years ago by Michael Collins Phillips, Final Judgment.
Let me repeat that.
The book is called Final Judgment.
I encourage your viewers and listeners to get it.
Michael Collins Phillips is the author.
In it, he presents not theory, not opinion, but extensive evidence.
That the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy was carried out really at the behest of the Israeli government, Ben-Gurion, because John F. Kennedy was trying to block Israel's acquisition of nuclear weapons.
And Israel worked closely with James Jesus Angleton.
The mafia, which included Meyer Lansky, not just the Italian part, but it was the Jewish part.
And when Phillips presented this, you know, he was accused of being an anti-Semite, etc.
The Anti-Defamation League went into overdrive to try to discredit him.
Well, now the documents that were released last week, unredacted, show.
That James Jesus Angleton was circumventing President Kennedy's orders to stop Israel's nuclear program.
He was doing just the opposite.
He was working closely with Israel to help it get a nuclear weapon.
And in fact, when he died, the government of Israel held a memorial service in Jerusalem for him.
They dedicated a forest named after him and put up a plaque because of his role in helping Israel.
Not only that, we learn out of these documents that James Jesus Angleton set up a program called Operation Red Cap in the late 50s.
Operation Red Cap was looking for young guys in the U.S. military who could be used as bait, could be sent to the Soviet Union as ostensible defectors, and be used to try to infiltrate the GRU and the KGB.
Guess who one of those young guys was that was part of Operation Red Cap?
A guy named Lee Harvey Oswald.
So up to this point, the entire Warren Commission effort to portray Oswald as some lone nut, some lone gunman with no ties whatsoever to the CIA, heavily tied to the CIA.
In fact, unfortunately, in Philip's book, all they had was the word that there had been a 201 file created.
At CIA with respect to Oswald, implying that the agency was following him because they suspected he was involved with nefarious activity.
Now we know.
No, no, no.
He, Oswald, was an asset of the CIA.
And that was one of the things the CIA has been struggling for years to cover up and prevent from becoming public.
You are an expert in weapons.
In projectiles and in the damage that projectiles do.
What is your take on who or how JFK's head was attacked on November 22nd?
When you get into a lot of these different people that have written about the Kennedy assassination, they always maintain that the bullet entered the front of Kennedy's head and blew out the back of his head.
Well, the autopsy photo...
Clearly shows that the front right lobe is like a flap.
A car door opened up.
It was blown out.
That shot came from behind.
Now, people say, oh, see, that proves Oswald.
No, no, no.
Because the angle of the shot, Oswald was up, you know, basically 20 to 22 degrees above Kennedy.
And that line coming down, that bullet would not have, it would have had to hit him almost in the top of the head to come out through that.
But when you look at the Zapruder film, and it's been restored in HD clarity, and you can go frame by frame over that one second when the front of his head explodes.
You see a slight movement of his head forward.
Then it goes back as the brain and blood mass is exploding out the front as the bullet fragments exit.
And it creates like a jet propulsion effect, forcing his head backwards.
It's likely that the first shot that went through his throat came from the grassy knoll.
That's possible.
But that last shot, there's another shooter back there somewhere.
And again, that hasn't been investigated.
What Phillips lays out is that the CIA working with the mafia and with the strong encouragement of the government of Israel put in motion the plan to kill John Fitzgerald Kennedy.
And it was a coordinated effort that day in Dealey Plaza, and the U.S. government has been covering it up ever since.
More about this the next time we talk.
Thank you, Larry.
Fascinating, fascinating stuff.
Both your observations on Mr. Whitcoff, on the significance of the relationship between Trump and Putin, and now on the Israeli angle.
On the assassination of JFK.
All the best.
We'll see you Friday with Ray McGovern.
Thank you, my dear friend.
Thanks, Judge.
Pleasure. Fascinating, fascinating interview.
Coming up, remaining today at 3 o'clock, Scott Ritter at 4 o'clock live from Yemen, Pepe Escobar.
▲
Export Selection