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June 30, 2025 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
26:13
Larry Johnson : How Iran Is Responding.
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Hi, everyone.
Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
Today is Monday, June 30th, 2025.
Larry Johnson is here with us and we'll be ready in just a moment.
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And now is the time.
Larry Johnson, welcome here.
I want to talk to you about Iran's response diplomatically, internationally to the Trump bombing.
I also want to talk to you about what you wrote about early this morning, the Western attack on BRICS.
But before we get there, can we get to the bottom of this totally obliterate nonsense?
The president repeated it yesterday.
Heg Seth repeated it over the weekend.
They continue to insist that the United States bombing two Saturday nights ago, quote, totally obliterated, closed quote, Iran's nuclear capabilities.
Is there any truth to this?
None.
None whatsoever.
I mean, it's just, you know, we continue in the West to engage in these delusions.
You know, Russia, for example, has lost more than a million men.
They're suffering devastating casualties, not recognizing what's actually taking place on the battlefield and how desperate the situation is for Ukraine.
And then we do the same thing with respect to Iran.
It's just lie built upon lie.
And we're deceiving ourselves.
And to what end?
In order to be able to justify these conflicts and supporting a war of genocide in Palestine.
It's just, it all comes together.
It's all part of the same package.
But this web of lies is massive.
I'm going to play a clip from President Trump with Maria Bartiromo yesterday.
And I am going to ask you why Trump was so anxious for peace, in your view, for peace between Israel and Iran, but couldn't give a damn about the IDF murdering people in Gaza as they're online to get flour and water.
But first, this statement to Maria Bartaromo.
Chris, cut number four.
But I wonder if it's traceable.
I mean, if they were to have moved.
They didn't move anything.
They didn't move anything.
You know what they moved themselves?
They were all trying to live.
They didn't move anything.
They didn't think it was going to be actually doable, what we did.
And what we did was amazing.
And there are energy commissions that went there now.
It's just thousands of tons of rock in that room right now.
That room, the whole place was just destroyed.
And the other two also.
Now, Israel was able to do damage, but we did the final damage.
It sounds as though he may actually believe this nonsense, and maybe he's getting it from Netanyahu and company, or maybe Tulsa Gabbard has gone over to the other side.
I don't know.
What do you think?
Yeah, he's delusional.
You know, Trump, he's all over the BAMP.
You know, we've watched him go from, oh, I knew everything to his Sergeant Schultz imitation from Hogan's Heroes.
I know nothing.
I didn't know anything.
You know, look, the fact of the matter is, yeah, there was damage done in Iran, but it wasn't devastating, and it wasn't ending their ability to enrich uranium.
You know, we've been through this before, and we saw it with respect to the Stuxnet virus.
If you recall, you know, that was over, what, 13, 14 years ago that this virus got released.
So it was developed jointly by the United States with Israel.
But the Israelis went ahead, launched the attack, and it was supposed to, it inserted a virus that was shaking all the centrifuges and caused them to shake and it would destroy them.
And the expectation was, oh, this will eliminate Iran's ability to enrich uranium.
And the intelligence community at the time said, yeah, boy, this will knock them out.
This will put them on their butt.
Well, it turned out, yeah, it knocked them out for about two to three weeks.
And then they were back up online and were working on enrichment even in an even greater fashion.
So, you know, this gap between the expectations of the success of these operations and the reality is usually pretty significant.
So, you know, Trump is just, he's spinning.
He's a salesman.
He's trying to tell you how this rotten piece of real estate is really a great buy.
Is there a consensus among the intelligence community on this?
Whether it's people that love Trump, people that hate Trump, people that are being intellectually honest, the people that Tulsi Gabbard said had presented a consensus, this is back in March, that Iran was not working on a nuclear device.
Do those people, have they offered a consensus on the nature and extent of the damage done by the bombing?
I know that the intelligence community had reached the determination even before the strikes were launched that Iran had moved the enriched uranium.
Wow.
And so they knew that before the strikes were launched.
So what you've created now is the manager, you know, because these intelligence agencies, they're bureaucracies.
So you get the director of intelligence agent, the Defense Intelligence Agency chief, and then he's got two or three deputies.
And then there are people that are in charge of the regions like South America, Europe, Central Command.
And I don't know if DIA is organized according to the military commands.
But whoever signed off on that assessment that was presented that said they contradicted what Trump was saying, they're not going to get promoted.
And so the message that goes down through the ranks is better give the White House what they want.
Or if you don't care about getting promoted, continue to give them the unhappy news.
But tell them that they're on the verge of getting a nuclear weapon.
So what it does is it forces the intelligence community to start, if they want to continue to have an audience with Trump, to lie, to flat out lie.
This is as bad as the intelligence community in the Biden days telling him that the Ukrainians were beating the Russians.
Correct.
Correct.
You know, once the White House, the policy position is set, that's what you try to feed.
You know, we saw this during the Vietnam War.
George Allen was sort of, he was the chief of the Southeast Asia Division on the Directorate of Intelligence.
And, you know, they kept disagreeing with the Pentagon assessments that, you know, the Pentagon was saying, oh, man, we've wiped out the North Vietnamese.
Well, it wasn't true.
And yet he was getting calls back then from the president, from the Secretary of Defense, from the head of the National Security Council.
So, you know, that's still going on.
This is not a Republican or Democrat thing.
But again, Trump instead of went into, and I'm not always saying that the intelligence is always correct, but to openly attack the intelligence assessment when it was actually, this was not just Kotolsi's opinion.
We've talked about this before.
This was a considered judgment based on actual evidence.
And now, ironically, what has happened is a significant, I believe that a significant source of the intelligence for being able to say what Iran was doing with its nuclear enrichment program came from the International Atomic Energy Agency, the IAEA.
Well, Iran's kicking them out now, so we're going to be blind.
So going forward, I think you can actually have a legitimate intelligence assessment where the intelligence community will say, we don't know what's going on.
We don't know what they're doing.
This is a probably unanticipated backlash to Trump's bombing.
And you've argued this, I think, that eyes and ears are no longer on the ground because the IAEA has been kicked out.
And it's being kicked out because they were effectively, correct me if I'm wrong, Larry, co-opted by Mossad.
I don't know if they're necessarily co-opted by Mossad.
So IAEA would produce reports.
So those reports would be available to government analysts.
But I do firmly believe, I don't know if it was Israel, the United States, the French, the German, whoever, it may be multiple, recruited members of the IAEA team so that they would have a relationship with a foreign intelligence organization and be able to get information from them.
And this information included the names, addresses, and phone numbers of these scientists that were critical to Iran's nuclear program.
So Mossad certainly got its hands on it and murdered these.
Grossi is an accessory to murder.
Yeah, I don't know when.
Well, it wasn't just that.
You know, I think as Alistair has pointed out, that two days before the bombing, a day before the bombing, the IAEA released this report accusing Iran of all this, you know, not complying, but it was based on 20-year-old information.
So they were helping create a political narrative that would justify an attack.
So they were not a disinterested neutral party in this at all.
And more importantly, here is Iran who signed the non-proliferation treaty, who has allowed IAEA inspections up to and including placing video cameras that would record 24-7 the activities at these reactors.
And Israel hasn't.
Israel is not a signatory to the NPT.
Israel doesn't allow any inspections.
And yet, when Israel and then the United States attack nuclear facilities that have been opened to and inspected by IAEA, they don't say a damn word, not a word.
But we've seen this, it is so politicized and under the control of the West.
They did the same thing in Russia and Ukraine, with Russia now in control of the Zaporizhia nuclear power plant, when it's being shelled and attacked by the Ukrainians.
Grossie was like, I don't know what's going on.
Jeez, it's just a mystery to me.
He's discredited completely.
Can you come to a conclusion as to who prevailed in the 12-day war between Iran and Israel?
I'd say Iran.
You know, when you look at the level of destruction that was inflicted on Israel, that they've gone to great lengths to cover up.
The two ports, the ports at Ashdod and at Haifa, damaged, shut down at least temporarily.
The oil refinery at Haifa and at Ashdod, also damaged, also operations disrupted, closing down the only international airport at Ben-Gurion.
But then the attack on military bases and military industries was significant.
But it's also noteworthy that Iran was not targeting civilians.
They didn't go for mass civilian casualties, unlike Israel.
You know, Israel was blowing up buildings just to kill one guy, and they killed families and neighbors and others.
They also, Iran could have gone after the water supply in Israel, but didn't.
But Iran, you know, if it was Israel that came pleading to the United States to get this ceasefire in place.
But Iran caused significant damage to Israel.
Who is waging war on BRICS?
Oh, the West, the United States in particular.
We've got to disrupt the fact, you know, when BRICS was set up, the reality was Brazil and South Africa, you know, they're really not major economic players, but, you know, they were there at the founding.
But what has happened over the course of the last three plus years now, starting from February of 2022, special military operation to the imposition of sanctions on Russia, and at the same time, talks of sanctions on China,
Russia and China have come to realize they can no longer be in a position where they can be held hostage by a U.S.-controlled international financial system where everything depends upon the dollar, only all trade depends upon the dollar, and you have to basically kowtow to Washington or else.
So they've now been, they accelerated their cooperation, expanded their cooperation, and BRICS is now growing and growing rapidly.
And more countries are lining up to be a part of it because why?
They've seen how the U.S. just wantonly uses sanctions to punish different countries if they're not obedient to the dictates of Washington.
And people don't like that.
They don't like being told what to do.
These are independent countries and they want to be able to chart their own course.
So the growth of BRICS now represents a genuine threat to the United States financial system that consists of the IMF, the World Bank, the dollar as the reserve currency.
And Iran, I believe that's one of the major motivations for attacking Iran.
Because Iran, by joining BRICS with its oil and gas reserves, when you combine that with Russia, it's a very powerful combination.
The United States wants to gut Iran.
We want to take out the leadership and install some ruler that's going to be amenable to us that will do our bidding.
We basically want a house slave.
Right.
They want somebody like the Shah.
The Shah is dead.
They're already touting the Shah's son.
But didn't the bombing of Iran by Trump and the attack, the surprise attack on Iran by Israel have the opposite of what Anetzanyahu and Trump intended with respect to the unification of the Iranian people behind the regime?
Well, yeah, I think that is, you know, if you've listened to Professor Mirandi and others out of Iran and people that have, you know, family back there still, you know, Iran is not this authoritarian state.
And there was actually, you know, there was significant disagreements and political differences internally, but they've come together.
This has united Iran in a way that it has really not been united since the U.S.-backed war from 1980 when Iraq invaded Iran.
And we backed Iraq.
Yeah, and we backed Iraq.
Of course, just as a side note, you know who was selling weapons to Iran from 1980 up through 1986?
That would be Israel.
Israel, Israel, in fact, the first deal was Israel went and got, they bought tires for the F-4, the Phantom F-4, because Iran was trying to buy them from the United States.
And the United States said, oh, we're mad at you because you held our people hostage.
So Israel went out and got them for Iran.
So I said, this is this notion that, oh, Iran's always been implacably opposed.
They wanted to kill Jews.
Please cut the crap.
It's a lie, but it's a Western lie.
And the current one, Judge, is, oh, Iran's trying to kill Donald Trump and B.B. Netanyahu.
The only one that's actually assassinated somebody are Israelis assassinating Iranians.
Iran hasn't assassinated a single Israeli official.
They assassinated Iranian scientists in their homes with their spouses and children.
Yeah.
Because Grossian company, the IAEA, gave their home addresses.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, it's just the hypocrisy.
And we, Americans go, oh, they chant death to America.
What the hell is America saying about Iran?
Right.
We don't get everybody in a chorus to say death to Iran, but by God, when you got people like Lindsey Graham and others, they're not talking about peace and prosperity for Iran.
They're talking about destroying it.
I mean, we got to look in the damn mirror at ourselves.
We are so overcome with hypocrisy.
It's just sickening.
Do you see any connection between Trump's behavior in Iran and Putin's willingness to negotiate with Trump and trust him?
Ray McGovern argues that Putin will still negotiate with him, but doesn't believe a word that comes out of his mouth.
Yeah, no, I think Ray's right as far as Russia's being smart about this and Putin.
But I think they've recognized the events of the last 30 days, starting with June 1st when you had the attack on the Russian strategic airfield with the drones and the attempt to kill Putin with the drones while he was traveling to Kursk,
followed up on the 13th where the same tactics, the very same tactics that were used in Russia were used in Iran to kill senior IRGC commanders as well as nuclear scientists.
I think that was sort of a wake-up call to Russia as well to say, wait a second.
You know, they recognize now that Israel is heavily involved with supporting Ukraine and with the efforts to destabilize and destroy Russia.
That's not just the United States, but it's Israel as well.
And what is Putin going to do about that?
Well, what they're going to do is defeat Ukraine militarily and by virtue of that defeat NATO and face the United States with something that they can't counter.
But try to maintain cordial relations.
But Russia's not looking to get into a fight, looking to start a war with the United States at all.
I can't necessarily say the same about us.
Here's a very interesting statement from your friend and mine.
We spent two and a half hours with him back in March, Sergei Lavrov, ripping into France and Germany and the Western hatred of Russia.
You remember, Larry, those museums that we visited about Napoleon's invasion of Russia and Hitler's invasion of Russia.
Lavrov is right on it.
Chris, cut number one.
Recently, Macron and German Chancellor Merz wrote a joint article titled, Europe Must Arm Itself.
Russia is the main threat.
It is waging imperialist wars.
In 2008, it invaded Georgia.
In 2014, Crimea and Donbass, and in 2022, the entire territory of Ukraine.
Putin's goal is to undermine European security.
I think that just these quotes alone are enough for anyone who has at least some understanding of what is happening in Europe and follows current events to realize that these figures have completely lost their sanity and are openly trying to return to those times when France and Germany wanted to conquer all of Europe, especially the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union.
Especially, you know, the recent statement by Chancellor Murs is particularly unacceptable where he said that Ukraine must be made strong and that Europe should not fall for Russian tricks like calls for negotiations, because otherwise Europe will be repeating the experience of the 1930s when the leading European powers decided to appease the aggressor in the form of Hitler's Germany.
Right now, I think this is a very serious, very serious issue, and without clarifying it with Europe, further dialogue is pointless.
Dialogue is pointless.
It's very serious.
And for him to, you and I know him, we had all that time with him.
For him to repeat, very serious, very serious, he means it.
Oh, yeah, no, absolutely.
And, you know, again, part of the Western mythology, like they accused Russia of invading Georgia.
Yeah, again, the facts of the matter was with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russia continued to maintain military observers in place in Georgia, because Georgia previously had been part of the Soviet Union.
And those peacekeepers were there from 1991 on.
And they were attacked in 2008 with the backing and encouragement of the United States and the Brits.
And it was in response to those attacks that Russia responded.
So Russia was not going out trying to conquer and take back territory.
They already had these peacekeepers there because there were internal divisions within Georgia between different parts of that country.
And so what Lovorov is pointing out here is that, you know, the French invaded Russia back in 1812.
The Germans invaded Russia, you know, a couple of times, but the most recent was in 1941 with the start of Operation Barbarossa.
So, you know, there is a history here.
Russia hasn't been invading either of those countries.
But that's the nature of this lie and the deceit that goes on in the West.
Larry, thank you very much, my dear friend.
I appreciate it.
We have a short week.
We'll be doing the roundtable on Thursday afternoon with Ray, and I appreciate your accommodating us as well.
All the best.
We'll see you Thursday.
I'll be there.
Thank you.
Thank you, Larry.
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