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June 4, 2025 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
23:59
COL. Lawrence Wilkerson : What Did Trump Know of Drone Attacks?
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Hi, everyone.
Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
Today is Thursday, June 5th, 2025.
My dear friend, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson joins us now.
Colonel Larry, always a pleasure.
Thank you for your time.
What is your take, big picture, before we bore in on who knew what, when, on this series of drone attacks over the weekend?
On the Russian military and on certain civilian targets as well.
Let me lead off with a comment, personal comment.
Sure.
Every time I see your snake, I love it.
When I was four years, five years old, my father used to carry me around in his uniform, and I'd look at his sleeve patch, and it had, don't tread on me, and that rattlesnake coil.
Oh, I didn't know what you meant by snake.
I'd fly that at my farm as well.
And Chris was able to get a very beautiful, flowing view of that.
That, of course, was called the Gadsden Flag.
Why it's called Gadsden, I don't know.
I should look it up, because Gadsden had nothing to do with the revolutionaries who used it as theirs, basically saying to the Brits, don't tread on me.
Yeah, it was a patch of the Woods Rifles, the company my father commanded in the South Carolina National Guard.
Wow.
Well, thank you for mentioning that, Colonel.
Anyway.
Now to the drone attacks.
Yeah.
Well, I think if it's anywhere near true that it went on for 18 months, I know that's not corroborated, at least not for me sufficiently, and that England led it, Britain led it, MI6 led it, and that we knew all about it.
And we, I have to caveat that, I don't believe I can say that about Donald Trump.
He may have, but I don't believe I can say that categorically because he's not aware of a lot of things that are going on in his administration.
And it is the closest thing to a provocation to a nuclear strike of anything that we've done in this gross war against Russia so far.
It's the same thing as if some proximate power, a submarine off our coast, whatever, shot whatever at Whiteman Air Force Base or Barstow or Minot, I guess it is in North Dakota, where our B-52s and B-2s are, and hit a bunch of them and burned them up.
It's absurd that we allowed this war to get this dimension to it, and yet we have.
I don't expect Putin to come back with a nuclear weapon, which his doctrine tells him he can, and we have his doctrine and have read it.
I don't expect him to do that, though, because he's not insane like I think some of our people are.
Lindsey Graham comes to mind immediately.
I do expect him, however, to devastate Ukraine, including probably taking out Zelensky and his entire entourage and maybe even half the legislature.
I expect he's going to be very dramatic, very painstaking, very careful, but he is going to devastate Ukraine.
Colonel, who's in charge of American foreign policy?
Could a rogue team of CIA agents have knowledge of this, have assisted their friends in MI6, have not told John Ratcliffe, have not told Tulsi Gabbard?
And if they didn't know, then they can't be blamed for not telling the president, but maybe they can be blamed for not knowing.
You can throw that in there a couple of times.
My experience is that a lot of these things happen below the president's visibility, and they happen for a number of reasons, but the most potent reason is lingering from the last administration.
And anyone who claims that they can find all the covert operations authorized either with a presidential finding or with a "don't tell me about it, I want plausible deniability" in the Oval Office to the Director of CIA, or in this case DNI, it doesn't matter.
They linger between administrations.
There are some things that are still going on that started with George W. Bush in the war against terror, so to speak.
And the CIA knows this, and so does MI5, MI6, and Mossad.
Mossad does it all the time, too.
Mossad invested Douglas Feist's office during the first two years of the Iraq War.
They lived in the Pentagon, came and went without any need for identification or security checks or anything else.
That's how much Israel controls the Pentagon when it wants to.
So they all knew.
And they all probably planned and helped.
You know, I thought of Mossad.
I'm going to guess you did as well.
When I learned of the ingenious way in which these drones were set off, it reminded me of when Mossad exploded my mobile phone.
But it reminded me of when Mossad, as dastardly and immoral as it was, it was brilliant, exploded the pagers in Lebanon.
Does Mossad still work with CIA and MI6?
Is it your view that this was led by MI6, and don't let me put words in your mouth, Colonel, corroborated or assisted, or at least with the knowledge of CIA, and would Mossad have been involved?
I think, with the exception of national technical means, the NSA in particular, and our satellites also, It's better to say CIA and MI6 work with Mossad.
Wow.
Wow.
Well, let me get back to where I was a few minutes ago, if you don't mind, Colonel.
Who's in charge of American foreign policy that's something like this, which, according to Ritter, brings us ever so close to the use of nuclear weapons, whether tactical or the big ones?
How could something like this have happened?
And the President doesn't know, the Secretary of Defense doesn't know, the Secretary of State doesn't know, the Director of National Intelligence doesn't know, the Director of CIA doesn't know, does the Director of NSA know?
There's got to be somebody somewhere in the chain of command that knew about this, the American chain of command.
Well, of course there's someone who knew, but I don't think they're anywhere in the position to keep the President informed about what they knew, and I don't think they were inclined to do that.
They weren't inclined to do that with Biden, but they were more inclined to do that with Biden than they would be with Trump.
And certainly they were more inclined to do that with George W. Bush because he had the DCI director of the CIA, was no DNI at that time, in the Oval Office.
So much so that a tenant on occasion brought a tape recorder with him to make sure that he recorded the conversation so he could get out of jail afterwards.
Did the president know that George Tenet had a tape recorder with him?
Well, the only way I know, Judge, is because an ABC investigative team invited me to New York when I was making some statements that morning on CNN, as I recall, about torture and said, would you come up to New York and help us with something?
I did, and I listened to a tape of a principal's meeting, which my boss, Colin Powell, Condi Rice was orchestrating it.
Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and George Tenet were present.
And I could think of no one else who would have the temerity or the motivation to carry a tape recorder into that room other than George Tenet.
He needed that get-out-of-jail-free card were what they talked about to be revealed to the American people, I thought, and ABC thought.
But we don't do accountability in this country.
I realize now you could have broadcast that all across the world and no one would have done anything about it.
Donald Trump, should the President of the United States be angry and should heads roll that he did not know about this?
He's in the middle of negotiating with Vladimir Putin and we're taking out one leg of Putin's nuclear triad and the President doesn't know this.
Certainly, Judge, but that's logical.
That's what should happen.
But look at what he would be doing.
He'd be taking out, in this case, the cabinet or cabinet-like people, Tulsi Gabbard, for example, or the head of the CIA, and they probably don't know anything about it either.
So how do you get down to the root of the problem?
How do you get down to the MI6, the Mossad, the people in ops at CIA who are doing these sorts of things and who have plausible deniability because they are not even known to the people that they're doing them for?
Wow.
This system is broken.
Harry Truman, as you know, regretted putting into place.
Absolutely.
Is totally out of control.
And they are now able, through the adroit use of their buddies in MI6 and Mossad, to run their own foreign policy and their own military policy.
You're right.
And when Truman went after them, after he lost the battle to Wild Bill Donovan and Alan Dulles, principally, when he went after them, though, he stopped them pretty much in their tracks because he wouldn't give them money.
We don't even have that stop anymore because the executive branch has figured out so many, in my view, unethical and illegal ways, and certainly I don't think constitutional, to get around the Congress, to impound money, as it were, to use money for things that it wasn't intended for.
The executive branch is an expert in that now, and it never goes away because once the president learns it, it lingers.
And then another president adds something to it, and that lingers.
It started with Nixon in a big way, and it's gone out of control now.
Money just floods out to people that shouldn't be going out to them.
That's how they get empowered.
Colonel, you're 100% correct.
Madison wrote in the Constitution.
This is almost verbatim, and if it's off, it's very slightly off.
No monies shall be spent from the public treasury.
But those which are recorded in a public journal, you try and find out what the CIA spent.
There is no journal anywhere on the planet that would adequately reveal what's been spent.
And Judge, it's even deeper than that, because I discovered during Poindexter and Ollie Norris' little escapade down in Nicaragua and Honduras and around.
That they actually generated their own money, and I suspect they'd been doing it before then, and I know they're doing it now.
They generate their own money.
They deal in drugs.
They deal in trafficking in people.
They align themselves with organizations like ISIS, as we did in Syria.
We had an occasion in Syria where US Marines were shooting at CIA and CIA at US Marines because neither knew the other was there.
Wow.
Let's Let's get back to the drones.
What kind of pressure do you think there is on President Putin to do what you suggested you think he will do, which is a massive and monumental response?
Our friend Pepe Escobar, who's on right after you, his new column is called, ready for this?
Waiting for the Oreshniks.
We know what that is.
Right, that's a very effective title.
Those things can't be stopped, can they?
No, not that I'm aware of.
I think Putin will be very calibrated, very circumspect, but nonetheless devastating.
And his prudence and circumspection will add to that devastation because he's not going to go nuclear.
There are people, Lindsey Graham I would put in this category, I would put Lindsey right here.
Lindsey Graham wants him to use a nuclear weapon.
And then Lindsey Graham wants us to execute a first strike.
I'm convinced of that.
The man is certifiable.
Here's someone you and I don't always agree with, but he does agree with us on Lindsey Graham and President Zelensky and the dangers of all this leading to World War III.
Steve Bannon.
Chris, cut number seven.
We can't have people over there telling the Ukrainians that we're going to back.
What we're trying to do is calm this down.
What President Trump is trying to say is, look, we can't have Lindsey Graham, and particularly Zelensky, leading us into a third world war with a deep strike into Russia.
And Putin came back today and said, hey, we're going to get to the bottom of this, and we're going to see who's accountable in Ukraine and beyond.
And that was a message to the United States.
What he's doing over there right now is stirring it up.
He's giving Ukrainians false hope that we're there to support them on engaging Russia in a kinetic conflict, and we are not.
Two things ought to happen: either cancel his passport and don't land back in the country, or put him in jail if he comes back.
And people better wake up to the fact that we're getting sucked into this war.
If the intelligence community actually did this, this is an act of war against Russia.
Do the American people vote to go to war with the Russian people?
He's right, Colonel, isn't he?
He's absolutely right.
And by the way, I wouldn't let Blumenthal out of that either.
No, no.
The two of them, they're an odd couple, really, but the two of them are virtually conducting their own foreign policy.
Have you ever known members of Congress to do this in the years that you ran the State Department?
Well, yes, but not in those circumstances.
And not with such dire consequences as a potential outcome.
Well, I don't want to spend too much time on Lindsey Graham, but Senator Graham purports to have legislation dramatically increasing the sanctions on Russia, which must mean secondary sanctions, because we've sanctioned everything in Russia.
So if Russia sells oil to China, we sanction the China.
I like that.
He claims he has 80 signatures in the Senate for this.
He is attempting to coerce the foreign policy of Donald Trump.
And here's a guy who plays golf with him and gets the whisper in his ear and sits next to him in a golf cart.
He is, and you have to go back a long way in my head.
It lost its egregious nature, if you will, because it was against slavery.
You have to go back to some of the people in the Senate, in particular, that actually did things like this to try and thwart the presidents who, one after the other, just prior to the Civil War.
We're in favor of slavery, either by extending it to another state, the war with Mexico, for example, to get Texas.
The reason we had that war in many respects was because the slaveholders wanted another state that would be joining them as a slave-holding state.
So there are people during that time period, but that's as far back as you have to go and under those very different circumstances to find someone doing this sort of thing so blatantly.
And I agree with Bannon.
I agree with him.
Graham should be censured severely.
Here's an example that I know you personally remember.
The Iranian hostages, Jimmy Carter.
Yes.
How did they get out?
How is it that they were released at the very moment Ronald Reagan was inaugurated?
Because a guy named Bill Casey negotiated it.
Was he head of CIA, Casey, or was he private citizen, Casey, Colonel?
Well, he was pending being head of CIA, Casey.
He was conducting a foreign policy, certainly under the nose of him, without the consent of the Carter State Department.
And it had a happy ending, so nobody went after him.
Does anybody get prosecuted under the Logan Act for conducting their own foreign policy?
I don't think we've ever had anyone.
I can't remember anyone that we've actually done that to.
There may have been some small case back there somewhere.
And we've had, as I said, we've had examples of it.
That very thing that I was talking about that got Reagan in so much trouble, Iran-Contra, also had its counterpart in the Congress.
We had people down there in Nicaragua and Honduras from the Congress who were conducting U.S. foreign policy, too.
So blame goes all around.
I think the Kremlin thinks of Trump's absence of control and ignorance on this subject.
I think it's opening Putin's eyes to the dimming possibilities of Trump bringing about some resurgence in U.S.-Russia relations, some mellowing of the hatred.
Is the big reset about which Trump...
It'll take a true act of incredible diplomacy, I think, on our part, and certainly an acceptance of a lot on Putin's part to get it back on track.
And I just don't think Trump has the skill, and I don't think he has the team.
That's the biggest thing.
He doesn't have the team.
You need a team to work the details in something as elaborate as this will be and as difficult as this will be.
And he doesn't have the team.
This is a strange setting.
I mean, we have the real Secretary of State is Steve Whitcoff.
The de jure, the one confirmed, is Marco Rubio.
The real attorney general is Stephen Miller, but the de jure one, the one that was confirmed I suppose that Hegseth is the real Secretary of Defense.
It's a strange and novel way to run the government.
Colonel McGregor, your colleague and our friend, says that this drone attack was a PR stunt, which will backfire catastrophically, much as possible.
Put aside what FDR knew ahead of time.
Put aside all that stuff.
McGregor makes that analogy, and so does Larry Johnson.
Do you agree?
I think it was a stunt to try and kill the Istanbul talks or to give leverage for the talks if you want to put a positive spin on it.
I think it was to kill them or try to kill them.
And it is going to reap the whirlwind.
There's no question in my mind it's going to reap the whirlwind.
I just hope the whirlwind is confined to Ukraine and not added London.
There's another capital in there.
Jeff Sachs, who will be on, Professor Sachs will be on with us at 7.30 Friday morning, says that everything Chancellor Mertz has done since the day he took the job And And look at his polls.
They're collapsing.
I don't think Merz has longed for chancellorship in Germany.
I don't think his coalition is going to hold.
Because the German people are not in a majority for that sort of thing.
Look at Starmer.
His polls are collapsing and he wants to be a wartime prime minister.
These guys are really in another world.
Do they have any idea?
Any idea what war with Russia would be like?
Are they thinking World War II or World War I, a troop's on the ground?
Or do they realize the Stormer will wake up some morning and London will be gone?
Well, in a Reschnick missile right down on the parliament might convince him that what he's pursuing is not the best thing in the world for England's interests.
I hope Putin doesn't do that, but he would be in his perfect right to do it because he knows that they were complicit.
And probably integral to what happened.
And he's got to assume, too, that this proves more or less in his mind and in his supporters' minds that it was an attempt to assassinate him that backfired, too, or didn't work.
That was worked out the same way.
Wow.
What do you think Donald Trump is thinking now?
How could this happen right under our noses?
Ukraine's a real estate deal.
Wyckoff will work it out one way or another.
I hope the former, but I fear the latter.
Does the United States government, the people we just talked about, Hegseth, Rubio, Gabbard, Ratcliffe, Trump, Vance, we didn't mention him, but I'll put his name in there, understand Vladimir Putin?
I think maybe Vance has some inkling of understanding.
I don't think anybody else in the administration does, and I'm going to include Tulsi in that, even though I think she's smarter than most of the rest in those respects.
I don't think she understands Russia very well and certainly doesn't understand Putin very well.
I don't think anybody in the United States government currently in office does.
Whitcoff may have some insights.
That he's gained of late, but I don't think he understands them.
Colonel, thank you very much, my dear friend.
A busy afternoon for us.
We have Pepe Escobar coming from some god-awful place in the middle of Russia where there's no internet.
A couple of minutes, but Chris has figured out a way to connect us to him.
Last time I saw him, he was on a house stand in Yemen, just outside Sanaa.
Right, right.
Colonel, thank you for your intelligence.
Thank you for the history.
Thank you for dressing up for the show.
Well, I can't let you have your time.
Me not.
Get a coat, Judge.
Get a coat.
Right out there on the coat stand.
We'll see you next week.
Thank you, Colonel.
All the best.
All the best to you.
Take care.
Thank you.
And as just mentioned, in a couple of minutes, at 4.30 Eastern, from somewhere in the middle of Russia, Pepe Escobar.
And at 7.30 tomorrow morning, Eastern Time, Jeffrey Sachs.
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