June 26, 2025 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
24:02
INTEL Roundtable w/ Johnson & McGovern : Weekly Wrap 27-June
|
Time
Text
Hi, everyone.
Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
Today is Friday, June 27, 2025.
It's the end of the day, the end of the week.
It's our favorite time of the week with the intelligence community roundtable with my longtime friends and collaborators, Larry Johnson and Ray McGovern.
Gentlemen, welcome here.
Thank you for the double duty.
Always a pleasure.
Larry, you have given us a rather extraordinary map, which you posted on your site, a sonar 21, of the significant sites in Israel where the Iranians achieved maximum devastation.
How bad in general terms, Chris is going to put up the map, but how bad in general terms was the Iranian retaliation, Larry?
Worse than anybody can imagine or wants to acknowledge in the West.
In addition, people fail to appreciate how big Iran is.
Yes, Israel hit Iran in a number of places.
Yes, Israel inflicted damage, but it's like a mosquito biting an elephant.
Iran is three times the land size of Ukraine, three times the population size of Ukraine.
Israel is so vulnerable on so many fronts.
So look at what Iran did in 12 days.
They closed down the only two container ports, so no goods were being imported, exported out of those ports at Haifa and Ashdod.
They shut down the two oil refineries at Haifa and Ashdod, so no more diesel was being produced.
They shut down the only international airport.
But more importantly, they destroyed a string of Western-backed investments, businesses that were in the military industry in Israel.
Those were destroyed.
The Weissman Institute had like eight buildings.
Those were destroyed.
Military sites throughout Israel, which had been covered by censorship.
The Israeli censors will not promote anything on that.
They were destroyed.
Israel, candidly, Israel probably would have had to surrender, seek a peace agreement with Iran in two weeks had the United States not intervened and brokered this deal for Israel to stop attacking Iran.
Ray, before I get to you, I want to play a clip from somebody who agrees with Larry about the level of devastation.
Now, he doesn't always speak the truth and he often exaggerates, but President Trump, Chris, the victory for everybody clip that you and I just viewed.
I think it was just a tremendous victory for everybody, including Iran.
Look, you know, they've got a country and they've got oil and they're very smart people and they can come back.
Israel got hit very hard, especially the last couple of days.
Israel was hit really hard.
Those ballistic missiles, boy, they took out a lot of buildings.
Those ballistic missiles, they took out a lot of buildings.
But, Ray, the Israeli government is doing its best to hide from the West and from everybody, including Israelis themselves, the nature and extent of the damage that Iran did.
I'm sure you're not surprised that they're doing this.
No, how effective they've been, a little surprised.
Of course, they did kick out Reuters in AP to follow Al Jazeera, and there's strict censorship, but that was the information that was missing.
And Larry does a terrific service in showing the map.
And, you know, people say, well, they only hit people on the coastline, right?
Well, that's where anything of consequence exists in Israel, for God's sake.
That's where they build all those sensitive facilities, including in the desert there to the south.
So, you know, it's very, very clear that now that we realize this devastation in Israel, it's clear why Trump was able to so easily say to Netanyahu, look, how about a ceasefire?
Yeah, please, I would agree to ceasefire.
How they got the, well, how they got Iran to agree to that is another story.
I imagine Russia and China weighed in heavily and said, look, agree to it for a while and we'll supply all you need for as long as it, oh, as long as it takes, yeah, as long as it takes.
Larry, did Trump ask Netanyahu for the ceasefire or did Netanyahu ask Trump?
Did Netanyahu cry uncle?
Or it doesn't matter who asked whom?
No, Netanyahu is begging for it.
But, you know, see, this was not a Trump plan.
Trump got, you know, he listened to the briefings.
What took place on June 13th had been in the works for several years.
And then now Israel came in with the propaganda, oh, we got to go now or else.
And they convinced Trump that when we hit, we're going to decapitate the Iranian regime.
They will collapse internally.
We'll be rid of this Islamic Republic.
All you got to do is sign off.
This is going to happen.
And that's why Trump was so ebulent the first 12 hours of this.
Oh, yeah, I knew, as he said, I knew everything.
I knew it all.
Well, then within 12, that was 12 hours, it became apparent that, yeah, Iran got knocked on its rear end.
It was down on the floor, picked itself up.
A bunch of senior military officers killed.
They were replaced.
Scientists, nuclear scientists murdered, probably thanks to the IAEA.
They got missiles out.
They started fighting back.
Within 36 hours, Donald Trump is doing his Sergeant Schultz invitation from Hogan Hero.
I know nothing.
I see nothing.
I heard nothing.
Man, this is all news to me.
And they begin to realize Israel was losing.
Despite all the PR and all the spin, Israel was taking a beating that it could not recover from if it was allowed to continue.
Ray, how and by whom was Trump manipulated?
Well, let me just pick up what Larry said here.
So we were right.
We were right.
And if Israel tried this, and even if the U.S. helped them, it wouldn't work, right?
Because Iran had a deterrent.
Now, did that deterrent work?
Well, no, because the Israelis didn't realize the power that Iran had.
Anyhow, they thought they could play it so that the U.S. would come in with two feet.
The U.S. only came in with one feet, one foot, and then said, look, you know, this is not a good deal.
Let's have a ceasefire.
So again, your question, Judge, I thought I'd just finish up what Larry had said.
How and by whom do you believe Trump was manipulated?
It must have been Bibi and the Mossad, right?
Well, yeah, but you realize that Bibi and the Mossad had their own agents right within Trump's Russian unit.
I mean, I wouldn't rule out anyone.
I wouldn't rule out Rubio, who wanted to maybe be a little crafty, a little sneaky, and gave a wink to this and said, look, when we take the president down at 7.30 hours in the evening on Thursday, this 12th, are we going to have a really good show?
Oh, yeah, because we suppressed, we have this special gizmo we used to suppress the AAA and the anti-aircraft missiles that we thought that the Iranians had.
Now, that only lasted eight hours, okay?
So Larry's to reconstruct that is quite right.
So who manipulated whom?
Well, Netchin Yahoo thought that, you know, given his internal domestic situation, this was his last chance to get Trump in.
Trump got in up until he realized this is not a good idea.
And they got quickly out proposing the ceasefire, which by then Israel realized that it was really didn't have much choice if it wanted to avoid complete destruction.
Larry, what happened to Telsey Gabbard?
She decided, you know, I think she's been paid off.
She decided to play along, play the game.
She, you know, if you go to Rogers Thesaurus, there is a new synonym, new word in there for Kowtow.
It's called Mark Ruta.
Okay?
You know, who's your daddy?
So, you know, Tulsi's doing her own version of who's your daddy.
Before we get to Kowtowan to Trump.
Before we get to NATO and the Kabuki Kowtow that we watched this week, I never thought I'd be asking this question.
And I'll ask you both, Ray, first.
Is the director of central intelligence a mossad asset?
He doesn't have to be, Judge.
He follows what the people in the lobby want.
He'll do whatever Trump, whatever he thinks Trump needs.
John Ratcliffe, I mean, congressman from Texas, what does he know about intelligence?
So, you know, Tulsi Gabbard, if she had any real guts, would have fired Ratcliffe as soon as he told those untruths about a nuclear weapons development.
Again, let's not obfuscate.
There's enrichment on the one hand.
That's what all the bombing was about.
And then there's work on a weapon, a weapon that can deliver a nuclear warhead.
There is no change in any of the information available to anybody, including Ted Postel, who's written about this now, that they have come anywhere nearer a nuclear weapon.
Now, some people think they could do that rather quickly, but there's no evidence, and the intelligence community has been really strong on that for the last, well, since 2007.
So if you focus on the enrichment, okay, you can, but then you negate or you simply prescind from the real problem, which is the weapon.
Now, can they get a weapon?
Yeah.
But even the former CI had, what's his name, William Byrd, said, you know, if they start to get a weapon, we will know very, very quickly.
So don't worry about it.
We got it covered.
Why did he say that?
Probably because it was true.
And he had one last chance to reverse his falsehoods of the past.
I'll say this true two weeks before I leave office.
I'll sell the truth a little bit and that'll make me feel good.
Larry, same question to you.
Is John Ratcliffe, the director of CIA, a Mossad asset?
Well, he's a willing collaborator.
Let's call him that.
He will pass on Israeli intelligence unvarnished.
And what they've really created, the Trump administration has really created a very dangerous situation for itself because those members of the intelligence community who tried to accurately report what was in the intelligence, and let's recognize one of the most likely sources of intelligence about what was going on in Iran was from the IAEA.
Now, IAEA would share, you know, there was information that they shared, let's call it overtly, but I guarantee you that whether it was CIA, Mossad, the French, the Germans, the Brits, or maybe all of them had recruited assets inside the IAEA inspectors and were getting information from them.
That's one of the reasons I think in the past the CIA was so confident that Iran was not building a nuke.
What we're faced with now, a very likely scenario, is with Iran cutting off access to the IAEA, kicking them out, and maybe withdrawing from the non-proliferation treaty.
All of a sudden, our intelligence community is going to be blind and not be able to offer the same level of confidence that they have in the past.
Thank you, Donald Trump, for that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Wow.
Ray, did General Kane or Secretary Heg Seth succeed in convincing anyone other than the president's most ardent supporters that we bombed empty tunnels?
That's really hard to judge, Judge.
Obviously, there is his base, and a lot of people want to hear what he said.
But I had a full briefing from Professor Ted Postel just 20 minutes ago.
And I said at the end of it, now, Ted, I can pretend I know something about the bombing.
And he said, well, you're well ahead of Hegseth.
And I said, thanks a lot.
Thanks a lot, Ted.
Damn it with faint phrase.
What did he tell you?
Well, one of the things he told me, which he really hasn't focused on yet, was we have all manner of satellites, right?
We have people that take pictures.
We have radar discoveries.
We're multispectral, which is really interesting and was new when I was on duty.
But we also have infrared.
Now, infrared is capable of taking what I used to call movie pictures.
Okay, they call them video now.
And their broadband is such that they can capture everything that happens.
And they were already pre-programmed to do that.
Now, what they captured in terms of the plumes arising does not indicate that anything got really through 20 sensitive degree on the Fordo.
That's big.
The other things he says is those highly or 60% degree uranium enriched cylinders were almost certainly moved before the attacks because the Iranians are not stupid.
The attacks were warned about beforehand.
And we had all those, I mean, the New York Times had pictures of 16 trucks lining up to pick them up, you know?
So last thing he said, if they were picking that stuff, they were also delivering concrete slabs, the like of which you have never seen before, because the Israelians have made concrete slabs almost impenetrable.
They're putting them on the entrances to Fordo.
So, you know, this business is cat, this dog and pony show by the general in the blue suit and Hegseth.
I mean, for Ted to say to me, now you know more than Hegseth, I said to it before, I said, you know, that's damning with faint praise, but thanks anyway, Ted.
I'm going to talk about Hegseth in a minute.
Here's Senator Chris Murphy.
I rarely agree with what he says, but I agree with him on this.
He's the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee.
The essence of what he says is they got caught in a lie and they tried to cover up Larry Chris, 18 and then immediately 19.
The initial assessment of DIA of the photographic evidence is that they did not fundamentally destroy those assets.
And what we also know is that the Iranians were successful in moving a lot of the enriched uranium out of Fordo.
And that maybe is the most important fact.
If we didn't destroy the 60% enriched uranium, they certainly don't need that many centrifuges in order to continue to enrich up to nuclear grade.
So listen, they're mad.
They're furious.
You can see it in their voice because they got caught in a lie.
They got caught in a lie.
They went out there and said that the nuclear capacity of Iran was obliterated, that we'd set back the program at least a year.
They knew they were lying when they said it.
They got caught in the lie.
That's super embarrassing.
And they're trying to cover up that lie with this righteous indignation, blaming everybody but themselves for the fact that they did the really unforgivable sin of national security communication.
They fudged intelligence.
They fudged intelligence about our national security.
You can't do that because as we have seen over and over again over the course of our history, that's what gets us into unnecessary wars of choice.
That's what gets not dozens or hundreds of Americans killed, but thousands of Americans killed.
They're angry because they got caught lying this weekend.
Larry Johnson?
Yeah, yeah.
No, this everybody should go watch on YouTube, there's a movie documentary called Zero Days that was about the Stuxnet virus attack.
The reason I bring it up, we've got the same parallel.
At that time, the intelligence community had convinced, they'd first told Bush and then they told Obama, man, we're going to knock out that Iranian centrifuge program because we're sending in this virus.
It's going to shake the centrifuges.
They'll break themselves.
They'll be done.
Iran's program will be set back years.
Well, they got the, you know, Israel launched the thing against the wishes of the United States, and it shut down, I believe, the Iranian centrifuge program for about a month.
Now, in this case, Trump painted himself into a corner.
And I, for the life of me, it's just, it was a pure stupidity, because I certainly don't see any strategic advantage to it.
He could have come out and said, look, we have attacked the site with six B-2 bombers.
And each one could carry two of these GBU-57s, the bunker busters.
It appears that we hit the target.
We're not sure yet what the full damage is.
We need to do a thorough assessment.
You know, he could have said something mature and sensible like that, but oh no, we obliterated.
We wiped it out.
It's not there.
And then when they, when even I know for a fact that the intelligence, apart from the DIA thing, I have heard from others that the intelligence community had already reported on the movement of the enriched uranium, for God's sake.
And now here's Trump saying, oh, no, we destroyed all that.
That was too heavy to move.
They couldn't do it.
He's locked himself in because you know what?
And they're now coming up and saying, well, when we negotiate with Iran, they're going to have to turn over that enriched uranium.
And I hope there's some Iranians who are as big a smart ass as I am.
They'll say, well, gee, Mr. Wetkoff, how can we turn over to you what you guys obliterated?
You deployed it.
It's all done.
Excellent, Larry.
Excellent.
Before we go, how absurd was the NATO butt kissing of Donald Trump this week?
And how unrealistic is it that any of those countries could devote 5% of GDP to defense and that the Germans can spend a trillion dollars, Ray McGovern?
Where on earth are they going to get it from?
Well, they'll borrow it.
They'll use up what Russian assets are still left.
But you're right.
It's crazy.
They're not going to do it, but they have 10 years not to do it, right?
And where will Trump be then?
I mean, it was really sort of a sad spectacle.
Okay, Trump says, okay, you're rich for five, I can claim one victory, you know, I can claim that victory.
Now, what was missing in that communique?
Am I the only one to notice that the former communique in Washington a year ago said that the advance of Ukraine into NATO was irresistible or what was it?
Irreversible, that was the word, irreversible.
And Ukraine was mentioned 850 times in that communique.
Well, I exaggerate, about 26 times.
This time, Ukraine has mentioned three times, and there's absolutely not a word about whether Ukraine will be given a path, an irreversible path.
That's the word, into NATO.
So that's big.
That means that Trump said, all right, you can promise me 5,000.
But look, don't even think about more Ukraine help.
If you guys want to do that, you go ahead.
I want to have one other thing.
It has to do with imagery intelligence.
Larry knows this, but most people don't.
In 1996, for his own political reasons, the CIA Director John Deutsch gave an independent imagery analysis unit, 900 specialists strong, to the Pentagon.
Why?
He wanted to be defense secretary.
He thought that's a pretty good idea.
These are the people that found the missiles in Cuba, okay?
What does that mean?
That means that the imagery analysis, as well as the overhead operations with the satellites, is controlled by the Pentagon.
Now, what will happen to DIA?
Well, let me make a prediction.
DII stood up.
Somebody in DI said, you know, Congress or the Wall Street, they should know this.
This is really, really bad.
It's could have another war.
And what's going to happen now?
Well, now, the National Geospace Intelligence Agency, which is what the National Photographic Interpretation Center used to be when it was independent and monitored by, controlled by CIA, they'll say whatever the Pentagon wants them to say.
Do I have proof of that?
Yes.
James Clapper.
James Clapper was the head of that agency before Iraq.
And when he was asked, where were those weapons of mass destruction?
He said, actually, he wrote in his book, I quote, Cheney and the others were putting so much political pressure on us that we identified 162 suspect sites, but we couldn't find of WMD.
So I take part responsibility in finding things that weren't really there.
Weren't really there.
Larry, we only have about a minute left before I have another commitment.
Is the United States still supplying military gear to Ukraine?
Yes.
Yeah, it's still going in.
But what's more worrisome is British, French, Polish, Australian troops are now entering Odessa, taking up positions in Odessa.
I expect the Russians will be killing a bunch of them within the next week or two.
I think you're probably right.
Gentlemen, thank you very much.
Thanks for your time.
It's been a dynamic week.
We've had a series of them.
Thank you for all the time you've given us.
We'll look forward to seeing you at your usual slots on Monday morning.
Have a great weekend.
Thanks, Judge.
Thank you.
And coming up, of course, on Monday at 8 in the morning, Alistair Crook, Ray at 10, and Larry at 11.30.