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May 1, 2025 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
30:45
INTEL Roundtable w/ Johnson & McGovern : Weekly Wrap 2-May
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Hi, everyone.
Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
Today is Friday, May 2nd, 2025.
It's the end of the day, the end of the week time for our favorite gathering of my friends and colleagues who, of course, join us on Mondays also.
Larry Johnson from his usual perch and Ray McGovern in Moscow.
Guys, thank you very much for coming on the show.
Thank you for the double duty.
Thank you for the time.
Thank you for all the information that you feed me during the week.
So, Ray, I'll start with you.
I was going to ask you, how are things in Moscow?
That's kind of an open-ended question, so I'll make it more precise.
Donald Trump said recently that the American military won World War II and not the Russians.
Larry and I have seen living proof.
That he doesn't know what he's talking about.
What's the reaction to a statement like that in Moscow within days of the 80th anniversary of the Russians' triumphant over the Germans in World War II?
Well, Judge, the tendency is to dismiss this as rhetoric, as ignorance, but it hurts, okay?
It really hurts.
The Russians come out of a long history of being second-class powers, sometimes called glorified gas stations, so they don't like it at all.
But, you know, history is history and fact is fact.
And if Larry Wilkerson and Larry Johnson and Scott Ritter and I, an honest historian, say that Trump is completely wrong on this, 180 degrees wrong, Then, you know, if that happens to coincide with what Putin is saying,
well, my God, we're not in Putin's pocket.
We're just historically correct.
So what's up the problem here?
Are we going to be called favorites of Russia simply by stating the fact that the Russians lost the most people and bore the brunt of World War II?
I don't think so.
I don't think we should be.
The president is not making it any easier for us.
Larry, on this same topic, mindful as you and I are of the impression that Russian history made on the two of us when we spent a week in Moscow back in March.
Is that a question?
Yeah, yeah, please, please.
Weigh in on what Trump said and on Your and our understanding of the Russian role in World War II.
Let's just put it in perspective.
Total U.S. combat deaths in World War II in the Pacific and European theater and Italy and North Africa, 251,000 roughly.
The Russians, in just the Battle of Stalingrad alone, lost 1.1 million.
An estimated 800,000 killed in action.
Combat deaths.
So, as far as deaths, who inflicted the most casualties on the German side?
The Soviets, and primarily the Russians, caused 80% of the combat deaths of the Germans.
In fact, the reality is the United States, we killed more German civilians with our bombings.
And we actually did kill German soldiers on the battlefield.
So you want to start talking about war crimes.
We like to cover that up, clean it up and pretend, oh, you know, it was this life and death struggle.
But we were committing acts of terrorism.
We were killing civilians for political purposes.
It wasn't the Russians that carpet bombed Dresden, was it?
It was the U.S. and the British.
Yeah, Dresden, Hamburg, Berlin, Stuttgart, Cologne.
You know, Vaughan, Brunkford, you know, just go down the list.
You know, is this a...
Hang on, Ray, I'm going to let you get there.
Is this a negotiating technique of Trump's, or is he just plain jingoistically ignorant?
Ray?
I was hoping you weren't going to direct that at me.
Well, he's ignorant.
Either of you jump in.
He's ignorant, but he's also bombastic.
I don't know if he believes that.
Somebody probably told him, maybe Mike Waltz on his way out, say, oh, by the way, tell those Russians that we win the war for them.
I mean, I don't know.
It really doesn't compute.
But, you know, as we've said all the while, Trump is nothing but, you know, unpredictable and sort of mercurial.
And, you know, God knows what Witkoff will say the next time he's in Moscow.
Start out by saying, you know, Trump only said that because X told him to say that he doesn't really believe that.
Whitcoff is the hope.
I still hope that things could be settled right here.
It doesn't look very promising right now, but I think it's going to happen.
Do you have a feel, Ray, as to how Russian elites or the Kremlin perceives these negotiations?
I mean, we're going to play a clip in a few minutes of Marco Rubio saying they're far apart, but they're getting closer.
It's hard for me to believe that that's true.
I can't imagine that the Ukrainians are, because as far as I know, Zelensky is still alive, that Ukrainians are conceding the four oblasts in Crimea.
Well, Lavrov and Putin himself have been surprisingly to me positive.
You mean military success or negotiating success?
Just overall success in terms of being able to trust, get that, trust Trump.
After all the betrayals of the last several years are going back to 1990 with James Baker in Moscow.
They're talking about trust now, and Putin has said he thinks Trump is sincere.
Now, he also said when he was out in Stalingrad, now Volgograd, just about four days ago, he said, "Look, you know, the war came to a successful conclusion and now things are going to develop toward the east.
We have the Shanghai group, we have the BRICS, we have the ASEAN and other things, and unless we can get it through the heads of people who think they are exceptional..."
And think they can exert hegemony on these matters.
We're going to be able to be all right.
And he's right about that.
He's talking long term.
But they're also projecting some sort of hope with respect to Ukraine.
I think it's going to happen.
It's not going to happen as quickly as we all want.
But I think Trump wants it to happen.
Putin wants it to happen.
It's just got to be on Putin's terms.
And it's really hard for Trump to figure out.
One way to disguise it, so it looks like we got something out of it.
Here's Marco Rubio last night on Fox, Larry.
Cut number three, Chris.
Look, you ask how close we are.
I think we know where Ukraine is and we know where Russia is right now and where Putin is.
They're still far apart.
They're closer, but they're still far apart.
And it's going to take a real breakthrough here very soon to make this possible.
Or I think the president is going to have to make a decision about how much more time we're going to dedicate to this.
Did the U.S.-Ukraine minerals deal advance the ball or lock the U.S. into some sort of a protective capacity for its own wealth derived from the sale of these minerals in the future,
Larry?
It's just hollow political theater.
That agreement is completely meaningless, useless, worthless.
It doesn't even deal with rare earth minerals.
It's really like touting some sort of 10-year investment plan where Trump has said, oh yeah, we're going to get paid back with $350 billion, that's coming back to us.
No, it's not.
Trump, with all of his big talk, flapping his gums, caved to Zelensky.
That's what happened.
He was so desperate to get a deal.
Oh, I got a deal!
That he signed on to something that is completely useless.
You know, Judge, the one thing people don't understand about this whole rare earths mineral bit is we've got plenty of rare earth minerals here in the United States.
45 minutes north of me, the Mosaic Mining Company, all these filings that come out when they dig out the gypsum and pile up.
That's got all the rare earth minerals we could use.
The problem is the processing.
And even if we get rare earth minerals out of Ukraine, they don't have the processing facilities.
Those are expensive to build.
Those take quite a bit of time to build.
And they can have a tremendously negative impact on the environment.
The one country in the world that controls the processing of rare earth minerals is China.
Like I said, this is all smoke and mirrors and political theater.
They might as well have had clowns juggling balls.
Do you guys share McGregor's concern that this agreement, if it were real, Larry, ties the United States to Ukraine?
In a way that it might produce a military clash with the Russians, or I'll dial it back a little bit.
I'm trying to summarize what Colonel McGregor said yesterday.
Ties the United States to the Ukraine in a way not pleasing to the Kremlin.
Well, no, I disagree with Doug on that because the United States has been the principal instigator of this war, starting with Donald Trump back in 2017.
It was under Donald Trump's first term.
That the Ukrainian military, both active duty and reserves, increased in size by a factor almost four times, from 320,000 up to 1.2 million.
In addition, while Donald Trump was president, he conducted the first amphibious warfare operations in Seabreeze.
That was accompanied also by anti-submarine warfare exercises.
And in 2020, his Department of Defense thought it a swell idea to fly B-52 superfortresses along the Crimea coast.
So the United States has been instigating and agitating for this war for a long time.
And Donald Trump wants to pretend that he's some sort of neutral mediator?
Nonsense.
The United States has already amply provided a causes belli for Russia, and it's just thank God for the patience of Vladimir Putin that he hasn't blown us up.
So, Ray, Vice President Vance has been all over the news media in the past 24 hours claiming that Mike Waltz has gotten a promotion.
Let's see, he went from having an office...
Right outside the Oval Office to being 350 miles away on the East River waiting for the UN to come back into session.
And for him to be...
Do you think he jumped or was he pushed?
Oh, he was pushed.
I mean, the guy was in nothing, let's face it.
What I'd like to just go back a little bit to what Larry said.
Yeah, it was Trump.
That decided to give Ukrainians offensive arms.
What Obama said was, look, Ukraine is not a core interest of ours.
Ukraine is a core interest of Russia's.
And so let's not get involved in stuff where it's not a core interest.
And the worst thing we could do for the Ukrainians would be to give them the idea that they could win.
Against a much stronger Russia on their border.
So let's not do that.
So Obama, for once, was making good sense.
I don't know where Biden was.
Maybe he was out to lunch or something, but he should have learned that lesson.
And it was indeed.
It was indeed Trump that started this thing.
But the big thing to remember is that this was a sensible sort of approach before Trump.
And Trump needs to eat some crow.
I think he's going to eat some crow, but it'll be cooked up very nicely, so it'll look like a moderate success.
Larry, just to goad you a little bit.
Oh yeah, there you go.
Chris, I thought we were friends.
I love you.
Cut number six.
Why was my guance let go?
So he wasn't let go.
He is being made ambassador to the United Nations, which, of course, is a Senate-confirmed position.
I think you can make a good argument that it's a promotion.
So, look, I think the media wants to frame this as a firing.
Donald Trump has fired a lot of people.
He doesn't give them Senate-confirmed appointments afterwards.
What he thinks is that Mike Waltz is going to better serve the administration, most importantly the American people in that role, and I happen to agree with him.
Larry, nonsense.
Look, he went from...
Here was Mike Waltz, who basically would give direction to Marco Rubio, along with State and Ratcliffe at CIA.
Waltz was the coordinator for the president of the entire national security bureaucracy, including Pete Hegseth at DOD.
Now, as the UN ambassador, he's going to be taking his instructions, directions, and orders from Marco Rubio.
Now, who apparently is being presented as the new Henry Kissinger, because Kissinger was the last one to be both National Security Advisor and Secretary of State, and just asked the Vietnamese how that worked out.
No, it wasn't really great.
So this is nonsense.
I think what happened is they realized that if they fired him, they would have been put in, you know, some trouble outside the White House because he didn't have any place to go.
He gave up his safe congressional seat.
So they're going to give him this.
He'll spend the year getting cultivated for a new job with some defense contractor, and then we'll get a golden parachute exit and he'll keep his mouth shut.
But this is by no means a great thing and a big promotion.
It's just J.D. Vance had a big old tube of lipstick to put on that pig.
Yeah.
I am loathe to quote Jake Sullivan.
But he made some very interesting observations about the chaos Trump is causing.
Chris, cut number five.
The president sets the policy, and the policy that he set is basically, let's go declare war on all of our friends, on all of our allies in the world.
Right now, I think Xi Jinping is getting up every day, turning on the news, seeing what Trump is doing, and he's pulling out a big tub of popcorn because he's loving this.
He's seeing Trump do...
What China would love to do, undermine our alliances, weaken America's standing and credibility in the world, take away America's advantage in science and innovation.
And he doesn't have to lift a finger for that.
So part of this is about personnel, but a lot of this is about policy.
And the policy of the last hundred days, I think, has put the United States in quite a deep hole.
Was on MSNBC's Morning Joe.
Ray?
Looks like we lost Ray there temporarily.
Oh, I didn't see that.
All right, here he comes.
Maybe he didn't hear that.
Larry, I'll let you weigh in on that.
Yeah, well, I hate to say that I agree with Sullivan.
Good God.
I'm not trying to ruin your weekend, and I hate to say it too, but when Chris presented me with this clip, I thought, we have to run this.
Yeah, a broken clock can be right twice a day, I guess.
And this is Sullivan's moment as a broken clock.
But it is fascinating that Trump has both...
Both alienated the European allies, what used to be called European allies, alienated the Japanese, and completely disrupted any hopes of civil conversations with the Chinese, the Vietnamese, you know,
across the board.
Trump, I think it was, you know, Colonel McGregor, with your last conversation with him, and John Mearsheimer's conversation.
You know, Mearsheimer's beside himself at this just destructive foreign policy that Trump has implemented.
It's policy by chaos.
Now, Ray, I know you are multi-multilingual.
I don't know if you're fluent in Japanese, but we're going to play...
Asodeska.
All right, we have a translation.
This is a very interesting comment.
It's under a minute.
It's a Japanese member of parliament imploring the Japanese prime minister and foreign minister not to look west, but to look east.
Not the US, because we are not trustworthy, but China is.
What the US is saying is already an impossible task.
The theory is already a mess, and there is no consistency whatsoever.
However, if Japan were to negotiate about what they have been saying, To put it bluntly, it would be like a delinquent kid extorting someone.
If Japan listens to the and bends the other way in response to the impossible demands of bargaining and deals, it will set a bad example as a customary and historical precedent.
If you get mugged and put money in their hands, the will come back to mug us again.
He's not a straight partner, so he won't listen to our straight talk.
Anyway, I hope that you will never give in to the American extortionists.
I know it's harsh to say, but they are extortionists.
Surprised to hear that, Ray?
Wow!
I am surprised to hear that, yeah.
You know, you don't have to know Japanese to realize what that means.
It's the same as what Putin said in Stalingrad or Volgograd.
They say we're looking to BRICS, we're looking to ASEAN, we're looking to all these Shanghai groups and stuff.
And so you have the Japanese.
I think the prophets say they're looking west and they're going to meet together because they're all getting together.
Now, the Japanese have a long way to go before they reject Uncle Sam, but they're on their way.
And Trump is just making it so easy for them.
You know, I had this speech that I did here in Moscow on Tuesday.
I later learned that Medvedev spoke before me in the morning and the following morning Putin spoke.
And my topic was Russia, US, the world, how it's changed.
And it's kind of nice to be this old because you can see first time I was here in '72, my God, the Russians and the Chinese were at each other's And the U.S. exploited that.
In the 50 years since, the U.S. gave the game away and forced Russia and China together, forced Russia to reject Peter the Great, for God's sake, and say, okay, we're going to look east.
We're not going to break a window.
He froze.
All right.
Ray froze.
We'll get back to him.
Larry, tell me if this is any way for the Secretary of Defense to communicate diplomatically with a country the United States is considering attacking.
This is what Hegseth posted on X. I'm going to read it aloud since there's no audio.
Message to Iran.
We see your lethal, in caps, support to the Houthis.
We know exactly what you are doing.
You know very well that the U.S. military, what the U.S. military is capable of, and you were warned.
You will pay the consequence in caps at the time and place of our choosing.
Now, Chris, the professor who responded, this is a professor that Jeff Sachs knows, Professor Murray.
I know Mohammed, yes.
Good, good.
Message to Hegseth.
We see your lethal and cap support for the Zionists, the child killers, the rapists.
We know exactly what you are doing.
You know very well what the resistance is capable of, and you were warned.
You will be remembered as an accomplice to the hashtag Gaza Holocaust.
Back to Hegseth.
Is this any way for the Secretary of Defense to communicate with the leadership of a foreign country?
It's called leading with your chin.
Because, yeah, you know what our military is capable of?
We're capable of dumping an F-16 over the side of the ship and having it sink to the bottom of the ocean.
We're capable of running an eight-week bombing campaign with a thousand sorties and not stopping the Houthis at all from being able to attack ships in the Red Sea or Israel.
Oh, we've sent up predators that get shot down by the Houthis.
So you better watch out.
Larry, you reported, after your research, That we have spent over $500 million, including the jet that went to sunk to the bottom of the sea, $500 million going after the Houthis.
Have we laid a glove on them?
Well, the $500 million is just the seven Predator drones that they've shot down and the two F-16s.
Then they've flown, Judge, 1,000 sorties.
And each one of those sorties, God knows how many bombs are attached to them and what the price of those bombs were, number one.
So this, and then the cost to maintain the ships out there, I bet you we're well over a billion dollars so far.
And what have we accomplished?
And that's where this stupid comment by Hegseth, I mean, it's just juvenile.
Ray, in your internet absence, we ran a clip of Hegseth on his ex-account, unprovoked, taunting the Iranians, and a response by Professor Mirandi, who's a friend of...
Larry's as well as Jeff Sachs.
And you just heard Larry saying how absurd it was.
Here's...
Yeah, I'll read it again, Chris.
Here's Hegseth.
We see your lethal support of the Houthis.
We know exactly what you are doing.
You know very well what the U.S. military is capable of.
And you were warned.
You will pay the consequence of the time and place of your choosing.
And here's Professor Miranda.
Message to Hegseth, we see your lethal support of the Zionists, the child killers, the rapists.
We know exactly what you are doing.
You know very well what the resistance is capable of, and you were warned.
You will be remembered as an accomplice of genocide.
In all your years in the government, have you ever seen a cabinet member behave like that?
Ray McGovern?
I've seen some pretty strange behavior.
No, no defense secretary has behaved like that.
I think Hefset should be on his way out as well.
You know, he and Kellogg are not being helpful to Trump, on Ukraine in particular.
And, you know, when you look at what Hefset said there, the president himself, like even Trump has admitted, look, we know you Houthis are building your own missiles.
We know you Houthis are doing this all by yourselves, okay?
So where does Iran come in?
Well, that's, you know, the old handle.
It's Iran supported.
Well, if the Houthis are building their own missiles, do they ask the Iranian, oh, we're going to shoot two missiles off tomorrow.
Is that okay?
I don't think so.
So Iranian support is there, but not in an operational way.
And the president himself has recognized that.
So here's Hegseth going off on the same kind of limb that...
That waltz and others go off on, and it's not helpful.
Larry, who takes General Kellogg seriously?
He was on Fox the other day, boasting that Zelensky has agreed to 22 of his negotiating points.
I can't imagine that among those 22 are the 4-0 blasts in Crimea and no NATO.
Yeah.
Well, Fox takes him seriously.
Jack Keane takes him seriously.
You know, the Zionists take him seriously.
But he doesn't count for the seriousness with the people that he needs to persuade.
And that's the Russians.
And Kellogg's not listening to what the Russians have said.
They keep pretending like, yeah, we're waiting for that Russian proposal.
Vladimir Putin laid it out June 14, 2024.
It's very clear.
And it's been reiterated time and time again by Sergei Lavrov.
By Sergei Rybkov, the deputy foreign minister.
By Peshkov, the spokesman for the Kremlin.
By Maria Zakharova, the press spokeswoman for the foreign ministry.
Down the list.
The Russians have been real clear about this.
They're not opaque.
They're not speaking in some sort of strange dialect.
They have been very upfront about these are now our demands.
And so the next step in this process is Russia's demands are going to expand.
Which will likely include taking the other four oblasts that are east of the Dnieper River, Sumy, Kharkiv, Potava, and Dnipropetrovsk, as well as taking Odessa.
And then at that point, Ukraine, oh, let's negotiate.
Yeah, well, you know, your chance for keeping that territory came and went, guys.
Chris, do we have Lavrov on ceasefire?
Okay, play that.
If you want a ceasefire just to continue supplying arms to Ukraine, so what is your purpose?
You know what Kaya Kalas and what's his name, Mark Rutte, said about the ceasefire?
The NATO Secretary General and the European Union.
They bluntly stated that they can support only the deal which at the end of the day will make Ukraine stronger, would make Ukraine a victor.
So if this is the purpose of
the ceasefire.
I don't think this is what President Trump wants.
This is what Europeans, together with Zelensky, want to make out of President Trump's initiative.
A clear and articular version of what he said to you and me when we were interviewing him, Larry.
Yep, yep.
So where is Kellogg going to go by going on national television and boasting that one side has agreed to a 30-day ceasefire when he knows it's a non-starter?
Ray?
Well, Judge, I mentioned that the leadership of the national security apparatus is divided.
Now, let's assume that Kellogg says this with the president's blessing.
Well, is there a method?
To the madness here?
Well, the only thing I can think is this is the maximalist approach, right?
He sends Whitcoff there to do the next 10 hours with Vladimir Putin and say, okay, that was the maximalist thing.
Let's see what we can do.
Let's see if we can work with a Zyessa or make that an international city.
Do you want us to stop?
We're just about ready to go all the way to the Dnieper.
If you want us to stop, this is what you have to do.
The only thing I can make out of this is that Kellogg thinks he has the endorsement of the president to make this maximum claim that he knows is going to be rejected by the Russians.
And then Witkoff will go in, clean out the garbage underneath and say, okay, now this is really what we need.
Can you give us something so that we can be let down a little easier?
We know you've won.
Let's stop the fighting and let's both claim credit for saving lives.
Wow.
Gentlemen, thank you very much.
Always a pleasure.
Larry, anything else you want to add before we call it a day and a week?
Well, I wish Steve Witkoff was going to Moscow and sitting down and talking to Putin today, but I guess that got called off.
So we'll see if Witkoff has been taken out of the game or if they're going to try to go more in the Witkoff direction.
Actually, Witkoff's in the back of my room here with Oliver Stone and me.
We're putting things together.
It's going to be all right, folks.
That's why I can speak with such authority.
I am glad he's listening to you, Ray.
God love you.
Safe travels, Ray.
We'll talk to you soon.
Larry, thank you very much.
All the best, gentlemen.
Thank you.
All right.
Take care.
Thank you.
Wonderful opportunity to pick their brains and to interact.
Freely with them.
On Monday, Alistair Crook at 8 o 'clock in the morning.
Ray McGovern at 10 in the morning.
Larry Johnson at 2 in the afternoon because of a commitment that I have.
Have a nice weekend, everybody.
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