Judge Andrew Napolitano and Larry Johnson dissect April 30, 2026 leaks alleging a Trump-planned Iran attack and a thwarted Hilton assassination where the suspect suffered no wounds despite police fire. Johnson critiques Secret Service marksmanship and warns that depleted PAC-3 and THAAD munitions, reliant on unavailable Chinese rare earths, hinder military strategy. He argues the naval blockade is symbolic due to insufficient ships for Strait of Hormuz operations and notes Putin's grain shipment retaliation threats against Israel. Ultimately, the discussion highlights Iran's resilient leadership bond from the 1980-88 Iraq War, challenging assumptions that their command structure is in disarray. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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Undeclared Wars and Blockades00:15:04
Undeclared wars are commonplace.
Tragically, our government engages in preemptive war, otherwise known as aggression, with no complaints from the American people.
Sadly, we have become accustomed to living with the illegitimate use of force by government.
To develop a truly free society, the issue of initiating force must be understood and rejected.
What if sometimes to love your country, you had to alter or abolish the government?
What if Jefferson was right?
What if that government is best which governs least?
What if it is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong?
What if it is better to perish fighting for freedom than to live as a slave?
What if freedom's greatest hour of danger is now?
Hi, everyone.
Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
Today is Thursday, April 30th, 2026.
Welcome to this special edition of Judging Freedom with my longtime friend and colleague and triple duty guy this week.
Breakfast partner.
Breakfast partner.
Let's offer dinner pack.
Breakfast partner all over the world, Larry Johnson.
Larry, thank you very much for joining us.
What prompted me to reach out to you in the wee hours was these leaks that we received about the president.
Planning another sneak, quick, severe attack on Iran.
But before we get there, you have written some very interesting things about the events in the Hilton Hotel in Washington, D.C. on Saturday night.
Was President Trump the target of an assassination attempt at the Hilton Hotel in Washington, D.C. on Saturday night?
We don't know.
That's the narrative.
But all we have is a person.
Who breached the security check, the first security checkpoint, and was stopped before he even got to the ballroom?
We were led to believe that he was carrying a shotgun, but the video that's been released does not show a shotgun and does not show this individual shooting.
What it does show is that there was one police officer or one uniformed officer.
We don't know if he's Secret Service or Metropolitan Police for Washington.
But he drew his gun as the guy came roaring through the magnetometer and he fired, it looks like four shots.
And honest to God, it's lucky that nobody else got killed because, you know, when you're shooting, you're supposed to know what your target is and what's behind the target.
Well, he wasn't, man, he was so focused on this individual.
He was shooting at his other fellow officers.
You know, they reported that one of the police was shot and they're blaming it on this fellow Cole, who was the alleged assassin.
But it very well may have been the other officer got shot by one of his own friendly fire.
So you, but you see him run through.
And then, as we, I think we spoke earlier this week about it, that, you know, somehow he gets tackled, he falls, but there's not a single bullet wound in the alleged assassin, which is extremely odd given all of the gunfire that was going off.
In his direction.
So, extremely lucky, or, you know, we'll call the Secret Service and the police who were there the gang that couldn't shoot straight.
Was he there to kill Donald Trump?
We don't know.
He has this manifesto where he said he listed, he didn't list Trump, he didn't mention Trump by name.
He went down to, he just said all administrative officials except for Kash Patel.
You know, I don't know what Cash did to earn the right to not be.
A potential victim.
But again, this guy, all he had was a shotgun, and you don't see the shotgun in the video.
So he had a handgun that had potential to carry 11 rounds of ammunition.
What kind of a handgun was it?
Are you familiar with it?
No, I'm not.
I mean, I looked at it.
I couldn't.
It's not one of the standards like a Glock or a Sig Sauer, Smith Wesson.
But it was not a high end gun.
It was just.
It was relatively, I'd call it a piece of junk, actually.
Do you think the government is making more of this than it needs?
So, when you have two people here who are competing with each other to become Attorney General of the United States, one is Acting Attorney General Todd Blanch, and the other is the U.S. Attorney for Washington, D.C., Janine Pirro.
I mean, she filed documents yesterday laying out the evidence against him for a bail hearing.
Well, that's ridiculous.
The guy's charged with trying to kill the president of the United States.
It's not going to be a bail hearing.
It's inconceivable that he would get bail.
Well, yeah, the.
When you look at the social media accounts of, let's call it Trump supporters, within less than an hour of that shooting, they were all putting out the same message.
This wouldn't have happened if we had that ballroom that the Supreme Court said Congress has to approve.
I mean, they all had that same message.
Now, the reality is that it didn't matter whether this had taken place at the ballroom or on the moon, the fact that the Secret Service failed to.
Well, let's call it.
They partially failed.
Okay.
The guy got through the first security checkpoint without being stopped at that checkpoint.
There were the number of uniformed and regular Secret Service agents standing around.
There were at least 15.
Yeah.
And only one guy reacted.
And this fellow Cole was running so fast.
Apparently, it looks like he evaded.
Four bullets that were fired at him.
Your friend and colleague, who's a terrific guy, Larry Cunningham, who was in charge of Reagan's advance team after Reagan was shot at that same hotel, was harshly critical of the recruitment and the training, the current recruitment and training.
Right.
They're not in the same physical shape.
They're not marksmen like they're supposed to be, and they're not even trained what to do effectively so that they do it.
Instinctually, when something like this happens, right?
And in fact, as you can watch this videotape, it's uh, it's pretty, pretty revealing because you can see actually there were two other officers that were out in front, and this guy comes running and they just sat there and just watch him go by.
Oh, get some morning exercise, huh?
No, it's like the roadrunner.
So, this, yeah, yeah, it's just a very, a lot of very bizarre things, and and then you know, they get to the point saying.
Well, why was Trump just sitting there looking around?
And Trump says, Oh, I wanted to survey the situation.
I didn't want to be removed.
He doesn't have that choice, as Larry Cunningham would have told you, that if there's shooting and you hear gunshots, the Secret Service drags the president out first, whether he wants to go or not.
Right, right.
Yeah.
We are hearing leaks from Washington sources that American Zionists, led by Mrs. Abelson herself, are aggressively.
Lobbying President Trump to resume attacks on Iran, this time a short, supposedly quick, supposedly heavy, excuse me, supposedly wave of attacks.
What do you make of these leaks?
Well, I think the leaks are real.
I think the judgment behind those leaks or the excuses they're using about, yeah, we got to really hit them heavy now.
Oh, so you went light the first time?
You know, the first five weeks of this was just we weren't trying hard enough, you know, implicit in that.
Look, I've got it on pretty reliable information that, no, I would say it is reliable information that the military officers that are commanding this.
So you have Brad Cooper, the admiral, who's in charge of central command.
And then below him, you've got an Air Force general whose title is Combined Forces Aviation Component Commander.
So he's the commander of all the aviation activities.
And then you have an admiral.
Who's its combined forces maritime component commander?
Both of those guys have told Admiral Cooper look, we don't have more, you know, there's not really more targets to go after.
And whatever we do is going to be counterproductive on a couple of accounts.
One, Iran is going to retaliate and retaliate in a greater manner than they did previously.
That's number one.
Number two, we're going to exhaust.
Precision munitions that we don't have a lot of.
We have run them down, particularly the air defense missiles, the PAC 3 and the THAAD interceptors.
CNN put out an article where they described the deficits in these different weapons categories, but they didn't tell the truth when it came to the PAC 3 and the THAADs.
Those are down to about 10% left.
I mean, we have used up 90% of that through a combination of.
What was sold to foreign governments, what was given to Ukraine that Ukraine used, and then what has been used in the course of the 12 day war in June and this recent engagement.
They're running on fumes with respect to that.
And the problem, which these officers know, is that if we don't have an industrial system that you flip the switch, turn them back, turn the production up, because the One of the main or all of those weapon systems, whether we're talking JASMs that are these glide cruise missiles, the Tomahawks, the PAC 3s, the THAADs,
all of them require three to four critical rare earth minerals that come only from China.
China's not supplying them.
So we're in a situation where they recognize we're using up weapons that.
We would want potentially use against China, and we're not going to have them available, which is why I think you know, I think Xi Jinping is sitting back with a bag of popcorn watching this whole thing.
Said, Yeah, you know, I think you guys ought to take another shot at this because he knows that if the United States uses up its weaponry against Iran, it's not going to have it available to be used against China.
You know, just as an aside, one of the crazier things of many that Secretary of Defense Heg Seth said yesterday, excuse me.
Before the House Armed Services Committee under oath, was that the naval blockade was worldwide.
I mean, nobody really takes that seriously.
But suppose China, suppose Beijing decided to make a move on Taiwan tomorrow.
There is nothing the U.S. military could do about it.
Yeah.
Well, let's understand about the blockade.
If the U.S. Navy stops a ship, then The U.S. Navy has to have one of its own ships stay with that vessel until they take it to a port or wherever they're going to hold it.
They don't just stop it, board it, and say, okay, we boarded it, and then get off and let it go on its way.
So, first of all, the United States does not have enough ships in its entire navy to do this blockade.
So, we're doing, I call it a symbolic blockade.
The other thing is, as long as the ships coming out of the Strait of Hormuz stay within 50 miles of the Iranian coast, They're not going to be boarded by the United States because the Iranian cruise missiles, the coastal defense cruise missiles, and strategic short range ballistic missiles and drones can hit them at 200 miles.
That's why you see the U.S. ships staying 200 miles offshore.
Well, you know, that when basically you've got about 100 miles as ships that you can travel, you're not going to worry about getting boarded by the United States.
So this is.
Again, this is another example of this administration lying to the American public and the media happily going along with this without saying, you know, let's take through the practicalities, the mechanics of how you do this.
Yeah, you board.
And then you got to, then, okay, take one ship out.
We had up until yesterday four carrier strike groups in the region.
And each of those carrier strike groups carry, you know, I think an additional four to five ships.
The Gerald Ford pulled out.
It's headed home.
Finally, it was replaced by the Dwight Eisenhower.
So now you're back to three.
So we have fewer ships now.
And if, you know, one way to run the blockade, put together a convoy of 20, 30 tankers and just have them all sail together along the coast until they get the Indian Ocean and then scatter.
The United States does not have enough ships in its Navy.
Uh, to carry out the blockade that uh, Hagseth is talking about, do you believe that uh, Trump will be briefed today by the military on the so called short, quick, a heavy attack?
Military Options for Hormuz00:09:46
Here it is, Trump to consider.
Well, this is ground troops, Larry.
Trump to consider a plan for ground troops to seize the strait.
What are they going to seize?
The strait is water.
Well, yeah, they're talking about maybe put him on Kesham Island that is right there at the at the bend, you know, the U, uh, the the.
The horseshoe bend of the Strait of Hormuz, or possibly Karg Island.
But again, we'll know if CENTCOM is going to do that because they will then appoint a combined forces ground component commander.
They have not appointed that.
And I think that that's one of the big obstacles to launching a ground operation, other than like a special operations raid of some sort.
Because you're not going to have an Air Force general or an admiral commanding ground forces.
They don't know how to command ground forces.
Correct.
Correct.
In the same way, you're not going to let some Army general run an aircraft carrier.
Got it.
Got it.
I wonder if the briefers of the president will be candid with him and say what you said a few minutes ago.
We're running low on supplies, we can't afford them, we've hit every military target.
This is just a performative waste.
And by the way, Mr. President, if you understand the Iranian culture and mentality by now, they're not going to come to the negotiating table because we bombed some more bridges and power plants.
Right.
Yeah.
You got to say, what is the objective?
You know, using military power.
Okay.
What's your objective?
What kind of outcome do you want?
The likelihood that you're going to convince the Iranians to, quote, open the Strait of Hormuz, they're not going to do that.
In fact, they're working with Oman right now to figure out how they're going to continue to control what goes in and goes out.
And let me reemphasize I've made the point before that the United States does not have a military option for opening the Strait of Hormuz.
Because to effectively open the Strait of Hormuz, you're going to have to eliminate Iran's ability to file, to fire coastal defense cruise missiles, short range and intermediate range missiles.
Ballistic missiles and drones.
To do that means you're going to have to go in and control territory in Iran as much as 100 miles inland because that's where they can still fire from underground cities and locations well within the depths of Iran.
So that means you're going to have to launch a ground operation and that would require far more troops than we have currently active duty.
So, I mean, it's just this is fantasy talk.
By some of these retired generals like Kellogg.
Jack Keane the other day on Fox News said we should kill the Iranian negotiators.
Yeah.
That's straight out of the Netanyahu playbook.
Yeah.
I mean, this is reckless and it reflects just a level of ignorance about what U.S. actual capabilities are.
So the only option we really have that we could carry out is to conduct more airstrikes.
Only one of the other concerns now is that since we're now entering almost the fourth week of the ceasefire, and in that time, Iran has received significant upgrades in its air defense capabilities.
I think you remember about a week ago that we got some excitement.
It was, I think, on a Thursday because it looked like the war had started again.
There were explosions all over Tehran, it has been reported on social media.
Well, it turned out that was an actual military exercise, a live fire exercise.
Being carried out by Iran testing some of their new air defense systems.
So, you know, the reality is if the United States engages in another attack or series of attacks, the odds are high that they're going to have pilots shot down inside Iran.
And then that's a nightmare scenario that Trump has wanted to avoid.
But there's no, as you said at the outset, there is no denying he is under intense pressure, both.
From Bibi Netanyahu and his crowd, as well as supporters of Netanyahu in the United States, the Zionist enthusiasts that include both Christians and Jews.
So Trump may very well give in to them.
We also hear that President Putin, in two phone calls, one to President Trump and one to Prime Minister Netanyahu, warned them not to resume attacks on Iran.
Right.
What would he have said or intimated or threatened?
Or how do you think that came down?
Well, with respect to Israel, Putin actually has some leverage.
You saw the Ukrainians were in an uproar two days ago, three days ago, because a Russian vessel carrying grain from Ukraine docked in Haifa to offload grain to feed Israel.
So Russia still has maintained relations with Israel and.
You know, I think there's a way to tell Netanyahu, look, that food could dry up.
You know, you need this.
So if you renew this kind of attack, there are measures we can take.
There are other things Russia can do.
But he made it clear, I think he made it very clear to Trump that this would make relations between the United States and Russia more difficult.
Forbes is reporting that Iran's supreme leader, this is the new Ayatollah, vowed Thursday, that's today, not to give up the country's nuclear and missile capabilities in a rare statement, making clear Iran rejects the U.S. key war demand, key demand to end the war.
An anchor on Iranian TV read the statement from the Ayatollah Khamenei, who has not appeared or spoken in public since he took over for his father, who was killed in the initial wave.
In February.
This is exactly what our mutual friend Larry Pepe Escobar predicted yesterday that nuclear enrichment and missiles is not on the table for negotiation.
Cessation of war, operation of the street is on the table for negotiation.
When those two things are resolved, then if we want to, we'll talk about nuclear.
Yeah, this is Iran's position is that, hey, we are acting like any other civilized country.
We signed the nonproliferation.
Treaty Israel hasn't.
We allow international atomic energy agency inspections of our nuclear facilities.
Israel doesn't, so we're not gonna be held hostage this way.
And I think Trump has been getting bad.
You know, this is not that Trump's off the reservation, but he's been lied to.
I think we've got clear evidence that he's been lied to because he keeps coming out with this notion that the Iranian leadership is in disarray, they don't know who's in charge.
They don't know who to talk to.
In fact, the truth of the matter is just the opposite.
Because when you look at the Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei and Foreign Minister Arachi, the Ghalibaf, the head of their, like the Speaker of Parliament, the head guy in charge of the legislature, President Pzeszkian, and the head of the IRGC, they all share one thing in common.
They all fought.
As part of the IRGC in that war with Iraq back between 1980 and 88.
They are all, if you will, veterans, brothers in combat.
Now, I'm not saying they all fought in the same unit.
Got it.
In fact, Posechkin, even Posechkin, who's the oldest, he's 71.
So back then he was in his early 30s, but he was a medic.
So he was drafted into the army, but he went and fought, did all of his work as a medic with the IRGC.
But Mushtaba Khamenei, he fought the last two years of that war, but all of them fought.
So, this is, you know, think about what it would be like in the United States if you had a bunch of combat veterans who had fought, you know, in World War II, and then they're all together now in leadership positions in the government.
They share that as a bond.
And that's something that I think the United States has failed to take.
We haven't had that since George H.W. Bush and Alexander Haig.
Selling Shirts to Intelligence00:01:10
Yeah.
Yeah.
Right.
Right.
Larry, thank you very much for this.
Very, very enlightening on both the assassination attempt and on what's probably being discussed in the White House as we speak.
Now, I know this is your second appearance, and I trust you'll be with us for your third at four o'clock tomorrow at the end of the day, the end of the week for the Intelligence Community Roundtable.
Oh, you know me.
I just do it for the money.
Larry, talk about money.
You could sell a truckload of those shirts.
If you could see how many people that write to us write about those shirts, all the best, Larry.
Thank you, my friend.
Bye bye.
Wonderful, wonderful person with extraordinary insight.
Coming up later today, a full day for you at 10 30.
If you're watching us live in an hour, at 10 30 this morning, Aaron Mate.
At 1 this afternoon, Colonel Larry Wilkerson.
At 2 this afternoon, the investigative British journalist, Richard Medhurst.
At 3 this afternoon, Hitting cleanup, Colonel Douglas McGregor.