Larry Johnson, a former CIA analyst, is known for his analysis of the Russia-Ukraine War. He asserts Russia's goals are limited to Ukraine's demilitarization, not full conquest, and suggests Washington had foreknowledge of attacks like the Moscow concert hall bombing, but that the US government is untruthful about Ukraine's role.
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| Elon's posting about it. | |
| So, I appreciate the statute of limitations. | |
| I think you're getting to a point that the base wants accountability. | |
| They want results. | |
| And it's not just about the DOJ. | |
| It's not just about Pam Bondi. | |
| You guys are doing great work at the Department of Justice in a lot of different ways. | |
| And I know because I've spoken with people, there's a lot coming down the pike. | |
| So we can put a pin in that if you'd like, but there's a lot coming down the pike. | |
| Could you at least assure our audience that you guys are working on stuff that they're going to like? | |
| Absolutely. | |
| But let me continue the theme here of a false narrative, which is that no one's going to go to jail. | |
| We aren't doing anything. | |
| We haven't done anything. | |
| Where are the arrests? | |
| This is nonsense because the Attorney General and under the DOJ, we have actually indicted 99 people so far. | |
| And we're just getting started in the Minnesota Somali fraud rings. | |
| So far, there are over 60 convictions and pleas, hundreds of millions of dollars involved in restitution, and additional collateral crimes, including attempted bribery by one of these fraudsters, trying to deliver $120,000 cash for a juror's home and things like that. | |
| And so, you know, we're also uncovering there's news of similar types of fraud happening in Ohio and other places where the Somali community is, because apparently this is a type of fraud that they're talking amongst themselves. | |
| And it isn't just Somali fraud. | |
| There's other fraud. | |
| I currently believe that there's been state-organized fraud, frankly, in a way in California, where Victor Davis Hanson talked about this recently on his podcast where he's talking about, you know, sort of inflated reimbursement requests for ambulances from the state. | |
| And then the state sort of pockets the difference and all kinds of crazy stuff like this, Medicaid fraud, there's autism fraud, and on and on and on. | |
| And so we are so dedicated to this. | |
| There are career prosecutors. | |
| It's not a political thing. | |
| This is the type of thing that they do day in and day out. | |
| I'll pause it here. | |
| I can hear people complaining about the quality of Hard Meat's microphone. | |
| People, I mean, it's yes, she should get a better microphone. | |
| Even maybe the Mac built-in microphone seems to be better than whatever it was that she was using. | |
| I don't know that we're going to get into this today. | |
| I just wanted to start with that and highlight a fight that I've been getting into on the Twitterverse. | |
| And it's not a fight, a shipwrecked crew. | |
| I'm going to ask Barnes. | |
| The guy seems to be totally unhinged. | |
| But there's a back and forth on the internet as to, you know, whether or not the current DOJ is celebrating the convictions and sort of trying to pass off the fraud convictions as though they are the convictions of this DOJ when the indictments and in some cases the convictions occurred under the prior DOJ. | |
| And now that this fraud in Minnesota has exploded because of Nick Shirley and Dave from his video reporting on it, you got the DOJ sort of doing damage control, what it looks like to say, we've been on this, we've got our convictions. | |
| Pam Bondi saying, oh, yeah, I'm Mohammed Noor, et cetera, all convicted. | |
| We secured sentences against them. | |
| They were all convicted in 2024. | |
| And now the last back and forth I've had with shipwreck crew is he's referencing Convictions that occurred in 2025 for indictments that occurred in 2022. | |
| So, I don't know if we're going to touch on this today because we've got Larry Johnson. | |
| And the first question I'm going to ask him: once CIA, former once CIA, always CIA, allegedly, and with a name like Larry Johnson, it's almost like Jack Smith, where it's a name that can, I'm joking, he can assume any identity and go anywhere in the world. | |
| Larry Johnson is a former CIA analyst, a turned, I say political pundit, but that sort of has a cheap, tawdry connotation to it. | |
| I was joking with Larry before we went live that you can tell when Wikipedia has, I don't know what it looked like back in the day, but it's quite clear that at some point Larry became persona non grata among the left, probably when he started criticizing Obama, and certainly when he started criticizing this proxy war against Russia. | |
| And we're going to talk about that today. | |
| So without further ado, I'm going to bring in Barnes, who looks like he's in the Matrix. | |
| Sir, how goes the battle? | |
| How goes it? | |
| Fixed? | |
| Yeah, Robert. | |
| See, who needs a producer when I just, what did you do, if I may ask? | |
| I just changed, literally changed computers. | |
| It was definitely the mic setting in the computer, was picking up a different mic. | |
| It really does look like you're in the Matrix, however. | |
| No, it looks like you're in the Tesserac from Interstellar with the bookshelf. | |
| Okay, I'm going to bring in Larry. | |
| We're going to get this going here. | |
| Larry, I'm going to put you. | |
| You know what? | |
| You'll stay on the bottom. | |
| No, you won't, because if I put in a comment, I don't want to cover your face. | |
| Larry, sir, how goes the battle? | |
| Hey, well, listen, I'm honored to be with you guys. | |
| I've always been a big fan of both. | |
| So, you know, the vicarious thrill. | |
| This is like the first time I got on the Duran. | |
| I've been watching the Duran, and all of a sudden, there I was. | |
| You know, Larry, I was looking for a matching Hawaii shirt, but I left them all in Vegas. | |
| So the guy got one of the meme shirts from the board instead. | |
| As Viva likes to introduce today, we'll be going over a range of geopolitical issues: Ukraine, Russia, and Venezuela in particular. | |
| But Larry has direct insight on various corruption scandals in Ukraine. | |
| Shock, shock. | |
| There's corruption in Ukraine. | |
| More shocking than gambling in Casablanca. | |
| So we'll be breaking all that down. | |
| But Larry, for those that haven't met you before, can you give the, I think as Viva calls it, the 40-foot overview? | |
| No, why I say 40,000? | |
| Larry, I detected an accent that I might say comes from, I want to say Minnesota, but that might just be because I saw Fargo. | |
| But Pennsylvania, like no. | |
| No, no, no. | |
| Misery, buddy. | |
| Misery. | |
| Well, now it's Missouri. | |
| So sorry, Missouri. | |
| I don't think I could have been further off. | |
| Larry, okay, just to get into the overview, I always like to know how many generations American somebody is, what your parents did, how many siblings you had, and how you ended up getting into being a CIA analyst and what that entails. | |
| But born in Missouri. | |
| 28 ancestors that fought in the American Revolution. | |
| First one showed up in around 1621. | |
| My fifth great uncle was the secretary of the Continental Congress. | |
| So, and he had in his possession the Declaration of Independence for 15 years. | |
| So Charles Thompson was his name. | |
| My fifth great grandfather, William, they both came from Ireland with their father, and they were in sight of shore off of Jersey, and their father died. | |
| So when they landed in Pennsylvania and in Philadelphia, they were split up. | |
| My 17-year-old great-grand great great grandfather went off to Virginia because he was a farmer. | |
| And Charles, he hit the lucky immigrant club. | |
| He became an apprentice to Benjamin Franklin. | |
| So I got some skin in this game as far as an American goes. | |
| How did you start out? | |
| How did you get to the CIA? | |
| What was that whole thing like? | |
| Oh, man. | |
| So I had spent 1983, all of 84, the first couple of months of 85 in Argentina. | |
| I was supervising the construction of a church, if you can believe it. | |
| Came back. | |
| I needed a job and the CIA was hiring. | |
| And so actually the pastor of the church that I attended, he was friends with Senator Orrin Hatch and, you know, wrote Hatch a letter. | |
| And so Hatch got me a recommendation. | |
| But I went and I took the tests and got through the test and started. | |
| The process started in March of 85. | |
| And then I got my entered on duty assignment in September. | |
| I think it was like September 15th of 1985. | |
| And then what was interesting about that class, I was in what was called the Career Trainee Program. | |
| I had one of my other colleagues in that program, Valerie Plame, Steve Hall, Steve Hall of the 51 guys who signed on to the letter that the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation. | |
| And then most recently, Susan Miller, who's come out as she was chief of station in Tel Aviv. | |
| And she was, turns out she was the author of the 2017 intelligence assessment. | |
| So I had a pretty interesting class. | |
| I spent four years at CIA, left in October 31st of 1989, moved to State Department's Office of Counterterrorism, worked there for four years. | |
| Then when I left state in 93, set up a consulting business. | |
| For about four years, I was partner with Ambassador Morris Busby. | |
| If anybody's ever seen the Netflix series Narcos and Ambassador Crosby, that's Busby. | |
| So Buzz and I were business partners up until 1998. | |
| And then we formed what was called Berg Associates. | |
| Former chief of international ops, Bobby Nieves, was one of my partners. | |
| John Moynihan, who's one of the brightest money laundering experts in the world, he ran New York City's undercover operations for four years. | |
| So we set up a firm. | |
| We did money laundering investigations overseas. | |
| We brought a Civil Rico case against the tobacco companies for money laundering. | |
| Philip Morris settled that in 2004. | |
| And then all during this period, I still had my clearances and continued to script counterterrorism exercises for JSOC and SOCOM. | |
| So I've had a boring life. | |
| I mean, I guess you're in the CIA for four years. | |
| It's not, I say not that long. | |
| I don't know what the average tenure is. | |
| It's a long time ago. | |
| Do you manage to maintain any contacts within the CIA? | |
| And my broader question is, everyone on the outside assumes the CIA is a corrupt, lawless organization that drugs homeless people and kidnaps people and whatever. | |
| Was it that way back then? | |
| And is it still, I mean, has it changed or gotten worse? | |
| I tell people, you know, the Hollywood image is Pierce Brosnan, Sean Connery. | |
| The more accurate one is from Scott Adams. | |
| It's Dilbert. | |
| Okay. | |
| That's the CIA, Dilbert. | |
| It is bureaucratic. | |
| It is one of my colleagues, he was on the ground in Afghanistan. | |
| He's been very active, but he always said that, look, CIA would do a better job of hiring people if it just had a bus drive around Northern Virginia in the Maryland suburbs and just randomly pick people up and sign them up. | |
| He said the CIA would be better off. | |
| So it's a large bureaucracy with secrecy. | |
| So they get to hide a lot of what they do behind the shroud of secrecy without being this nefarious organization that's a well-oiled, menacing, malevolent machine. | |
| Because I can tell you story after story of how they talk things up. | |
| I mean, very one real quick anecdote. | |
| Remember when the Contras were the number one priority, at least one of the top five foreign policy priorities for the U.S. government under Ronald Reagan. | |
| And the Congress had cut off funding, but they then started the funding back up. | |
| So the Central American Task Force, which is headed by a guy named Alan Fires at the time, they fired it back up and they set up a base called Swan Island off the coast of Honduras that was going to be used to resupply the Contras. | |
| And the guy that was put in charge of the base was a buddy of Alan Fires, who was a known alcoholic. | |
| And so early on, they bought a Casa 212 and this airplane that was going to be used to kick cargo out to the Contras. | |
| And they had to test its navigation system to see if it could find its way in the dark back to the base. | |
| So one day they brought in two Rhodesian pilots. | |
| These were contractors out of Africa. | |
| And late in the afternoon, they climbed on the plane, they flew off. | |
| And the chief of base took the beacon that they were going to follow, went into a concrete bunker, drank a bottle of scotch, passed out. | |
| Well, now the beacon's in the bunker and it can't broadcast outside the bunker. | |
| So here are these guys in this brand new multi-million dollar airplane. | |
| They're flying over the Caribbean. | |
| They can't find their way back to the island. | |
| They finally have to ditch the plane in the Caribbean. | |
| You know, I think it was like $20 million aircraft, sinks to the bottom. | |
| They float around in a raft for two days until they're picked up by a Soviet trawler. | |
| So that's your CIA in action. | |
| And I'd like to say, oh, that was an aberration, but I can tell you story after story of that kind of incompetence. | |
| Did they have to eject with the seats or how did they get out of the plane? | |
| No, no, they crash-landed and climbed out the doors. | |
| What led to your interest in geopolitics? | |
| Was it working for the CIA? | |
| Was it predate the CIA or did it post-date the CIA in the sense of trying to master the complexities of geopolitics in the modern world? | |
| Okay, let me ask you a question, Robert. | |
| How old were you when you read William Schreier's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich? | |
| I was in high school, probably. | |
| Fellow the nerd. | |
| I was 13. | |
| Okay, yeah, yeah, fellow nerd. | |
| So, yeah. | |
| So, that's, I was just naturally drawn to it. | |
| Of course, you know, I went to my junior high school. | |
| I was literally 500 feet from the front door of Harry Truman's house. | |
| Oh, wow. | |
| Yeah. | |
| And I have living memory. | |
| I'm that old of seeing Harry Truman walk the streets with his fat bodyguard from the Sugar Creek Police Department, a guy named Mike Kelly. | |
| Kelly would be waddling behind Truman. | |
| Truman's, you know, humping it down the street, 79 years old. | |
| Oh, wow. | |
| The so the you got to work with the CIA. | |
| You come out, you do a lot of work. | |
| When you were saying money laundering expertise, I thought you were about to say one of the greatest money launderers, just because of the nature of that world. | |
| But at what point do you start Sonar 21 and decide to, you know, share your insights for the rest of the rest of the world? | |
| It actually started off as no quarter. | |
| And that was about 2003, 2004. | |
| It was about the time that Valerie Plame was outed. | |
| Because when Valerie came out and they were claiming she was just a secretary and she wasn't, you know, anyway, she was a knock. | |
| She was a non-official cover officer and she ran other knocks. | |
| She was in the most sensitive, most secret of positions, and they were trashing her. | |
| What was sort of funny is I had been at a Nixon Center event with there was like 14 of us in the room. | |
| Jim Schlesinger was there, Charles Krautheimer, Patrick Lang, who used to be the chief of Defense Intelligence Agency's Middle East Division, and one Joseph Wilson, Ambassador. | |
| And this was like December of 2002. | |
| And it was chaired by Dimitri Symes. | |
| You know, Dimitri has been a friend for good Lord now, 28 years. | |
| And anyway, the discussion was about were we going to go to war in Iraq. | |
| So, and at that time, I didn't know that Joe was married to Valerie because Valerie had been one of my classmates. | |
| I didn't find that out until actually, you know, when they mentioned Valerie Wilson, I didn't make the connection until one of my classmates called me up and said, Hey, that's our Val. | |
| I went, What? | |
| And I, because when we went through the career trainee program, I was Larry J. | |
| She was Valerie P. | |
| So because everybody who was in the class was undercover. | |
| Now, you're correct, Viva, talking about with the name Larry Johnson. | |
| You know, we had to get cover names. | |
| So I was a big fan of Wade Boggs back then. | |
| So I went for Larry Boggs. | |
| But the problem is with Larry Johnson, they keep thinking I'm a six foot eight black guy playing center power forward for the Knicks, okay? | |
| Or a running back for the Kansas City Chiefs and the Penn State Lions, you know. | |
| Larry, I was just trying to find where Mike Benz was talking about something in respect of Epstein and the CIA. | |
| And if it's out of your wheelhouse, I have to ask it anyhow because it's going to bug me if I don't. | |
| Before we get into the Russia stuff, CIA. | |
| One of the arguments is that if Epstein were a CIA asset or involved with the CIA, no searches in any FBI or DOJ files would bring up that information and that Epstein might very well have an entire use interaction history with the CIA that nobody's asked about, nobody's looked into. | |
| I say except for Mike Benz, but Mike Benz has been doing a lot of work on that. | |
| The question is, what would be the protocol? | |
| Do you have any knowledge of Epstein and the CIA? | |
| And what would be the protocol for the CIA to do its own, not FOIA, but its own research to see what connections Epstein ever had or interactions with elements of the CIA? | |
| Oh, well, no, they'd have him in the files. | |
| I had no firsthand knowledge or personal interaction with him. | |
| What I do know, though, is through his father-in-law, Maxwell, or through Robert Maxwell, they were involved with the arms supply to the Contras. | |
| That was a big deal. | |
| So, yeah, he definitely had CIA connections. | |
| Now, did that take precedence over his Mossad connections? | |
| I don't think so. | |
| But I think that's one of the principal reasons they're sitting on a lot of this information because it will expose, it's not going to expose deep, dark CIA secrets in terms of putting people at risk, other than people who did bad things would be at risk. | |
| Yes. | |
| So you get going with Sonar 21 and cover the landscape. | |
| What's that been like in terms of the interaction with the community, developing an independent brand? | |
| I mean, you're one of the very few consistently accurate, independent geopolitical commentators out there. | |
| I mean, we are flooded with misinformation, especially in the geopolitical place. | |
| What has that whole life been like? | |
| Yeah, so I had used a blog at No Quarter, and then came March 2017. | |
| And when I went to, I contacted Devin Nunes. | |
| So, when Devin Nunes was selected to go on the House Intelligence Committee in 2012, my next door neighbor, who is the largest defense lobbyist in DC, I lived in Bethesda on Burning Tree Road at the time, he came to me and said, Hey, I've got this congressman who's going to be going into this intelligence committee. | |
| Do you mind briefing him, helping him get up to speed? | |
| And so, I went along with another former CIA colleague who had been, he had actually been chief of admin for the NOC program. | |
| And he had been air, Lebanon, when the chief of station Buckley was kidnapped and murdered. | |
| He'd been inside. | |
| So, we had both operations and intelligence covered. | |
| And we briefed, we spent about two hours with Devin briefing him up. | |
| So, you know, five years later, I've got information from a friend on the inside. | |
| And, you know, off air, I can tell you more about his background. | |
| But that the Brits were spying on Trump. | |
| They were the ones collecting on Trump and his whole organization through GCHQ. | |
| That information is passed to the NSA, and then the NSA can use it as liaison reporting. | |
| So the NSA, we didn't collect it. | |
| It was collected by those guys. | |
| So I had that information. | |
| And I went in to brief Devin on it. | |
| Because if you recall, like in January of that year, the former NSA director or then current Mike Rogers had resigned, but he had gone and had a meeting with the Trump people and apparently alerted them to some of the shenanigans that were going on. | |
| And then Robert Hannigan, who was the head of GCHQ, suddenly resigned for spent more time with his family in January. | |
| And so I went on, it was like March 9th, March 10th, I briefed Devin in his office. | |
| And Devin didn't have a clue. | |
| It's not a knock on, you know, nor should he. | |
| I mean, he didn't work in it. | |
| By that point, I'd held clearances for like 25, 28 years. | |
| And so I explained to him what had happened and then who he needed to talk to. | |
| And I gave him a couple of names to follow up with that could brief him from because they were still in government. | |
| And then that's what led. | |
| Remember when he went down to the White House and then came out and this whole scrum erupted? | |
| I caused that. | |
| That was me. | |
| So that's when I started. | |
| The media then came after me with a vengeance. | |
| And one of my business partners, even initially, he cut off contact with me because he was being told by DOJ that, oh, I was dangerous. | |
| Now he later came, he apologized later and said they were full of you know full of it and realized that I'd been played. | |
| But so out of that, I went sort of low-key and I wrote under alias at Pat Lang's blog. | |
| Pat was the former chief of Middle East division of DIA. | |
| He'd been defense attaché in Saudi Arabia, Yemen. | |
| He set up the Arabic program at West Point. | |
| And then I came out and launched Sonar 21 about 2018, I believe. | |
| And a lot of what I was writing was about the whole Russia gate because I could tell from the outside that, you know, this, well, actually, what I was told by the same individual that went with me to brief Devin Nunes, he contacted me in like June of 2017 and said he just had a conversation with one of his still active duty colleagues. | |
| And that colleague told him, he said, hey, in the summer of 2015, John Brennan came to me and they were organizing a task force to collect intelligence on all of the presidential candidates except Hillary. | |
| And so they were even collecting on Bernie Sanders. | |
| They were collecting on Marco, on Ted Cruz, on God knows who else. | |
| And it wasn't until late in December of 2015 that they then decided to start focusing on Trump because they realized Trump was going to win it. | |
| And that's when that whole operation in that laser focused on Trump. | |
| Well, Barnes and I have talked about it a lot on the channel, the laser focus on Trump, but also tying it into Russia because they were trying to lay the groundwork for an eventual war with Russia, you know, back in 2015. | |
| This is now the Maidan revolution was 2014 or 2012? | |
| 2014. | |
| 2014. | |
| So, I mean, it's shortly thereafter. | |
| I mean, I guess the one question is: you've been in the CIA for a long time. | |
| Between Russia and the Middle East, those have always been the two villains in movies. | |
| You know, the Nazi Germans got a little old. | |
| You know, what is this? | |
| What is this idea of continuing to vilify Russia? | |
| And how long do you think this long play of the proxy war that we're involved in right now was being the groundwork was being laid for back in the day? | |
| Yeah, well, two things have triggered, let's separate anti-Russian from anti-Putin. | |
| The worm turned against Putin in March of 2003. | |
| You want to guess why? | |
| Hold on. | |
| I put myself on mute. | |
| I want to guess why, but I okay, so this is post-9-11. | |
| It's March of 2003. | |
| Let's think, mission accomplished. | |
| Afghanistan. | |
| No. | |
| Iraq. | |
| Iraq. | |
| Damn it. | |
| Okay. | |
| Yeah, he opposed the war in Iraq. | |
| Now, this coincided with his, in 2000, it was either July of 2001 or July of 2002. | |
| So remember, when he took over on August 9th of 1999, the Russian economy, to call it a shithole would have been an insult to shitholes. | |
| I mean, it was terrible. | |
| I talked to Matt Taibbi, who lived over there at the time, and he even recorded, you know, there were times that you would even see bodies in the street. | |
| I mean, Russia's society was in a collapse. | |
| It had gone from life expectancy for men had dropped from like 63 to 56 in a seven-year period. | |
| They had at least 8 million suicides above and beyond the normal death. | |
| It was a disaster. | |
| And yet all these Western capitalists, or let's call them oligarchs, were in there partnering up with other aspiring oligarchs in Russia, and they were bleeding the place dry. | |
| And so by 2002, Vladimir Putin had come to Vladimir meeting with all of the oligarchs, called him into the Kremlin, and basically said, hey, here's the deal, guys. | |
| You're going to stop selling off Russia to foreigners. | |
| That's going to stop. | |
| You can make as much money as you want here, but you're going to keep the money here. | |
| We're going to invest it here, and you're going to stay the hell out of politics. | |
| Those are the terms. | |
| And if you don't like it, I'm going to put you in prison. | |
| Well, that put a screeching halt to a lot of business deals that a lot of people in the West were counting on making lots of money off of. | |
| And that's where also another factor playing into this. | |
| What is fascinating is Russia is consistently described now in the West as this imperialist military power. | |
| Russia didn't start really effectively rebuilding its military until after the Maidan crisis in 2014. | |
| And they're always accused of, oh, they invaded Georgia. | |
| But the people that say that, they're incredibly stupid. | |
| Because when the Soviet Union collapsed, there were these couple of territories in Ossetia. | |
| It was a big one in Georgia. | |
| So the Russians, the then Soviets, now Russians, left peacekeeping forces in those two regions to separate the Georgians and them from fighting. | |
| And then it was only in 2008 at the encouragement of NATO that the Georgians attacked the Russians, and then the Russians turned around and beat the hell out of the Georgians in two weeks. | |
| That was the extent of it. | |
| But yet Russia has been constantly portrayed as this voracious imperialist power and always come back and say, how many military bases overseas does Russia have? | |
| How many colonies in South America, Central America, Africa, Asia has Russia had? | |
| And the answer is zero. | |
| How many does the United States have? | |
| Oh boy, that's a long tale. | |
| So it's just, I've always been, I'm the one that always got in trouble for raising the question. | |
| Within six months of my arrival, when I started my job as the analyst, I was the Honduran analyst. | |
| And the then director of the Office of Africa-Latin American Affairs, John Allen was his name, called all the new analysts into his office. | |
| He says, hey, you know, I hear they've got some morale problems. | |
| I'd like to know what those are. | |
| And I, okay, I was 31. | |
| I should have known better, but I admit it. | |
| I was stupid. | |
| I thought he really wanted to know. | |
| So I told him. | |
| I said, well, John, I said, it's pretty simple. | |
| I said, last year, your predecessor, the guy's name was Rick Stakeham. | |
| The analysts called him Rapum Stakeham. | |
| Okay. | |
| Now, he wasn't exactly beloved. | |
| And the counterpart to Stakehold, a guy who was the chief of the Near East Division in Near East Asia that handled the Middle East, he got a $25,000 cash award. | |
| He threw a party for his analysts. | |
| And what did Rapham Stakeum do? | |
| He took his $25,000 and bought himself a Lexus. | |
| And so I pointed that out. | |
| I said, that's the problem, John, that the analysts don't feel appreciated. | |
| He turned bright red. | |
| And then he turned to the other. | |
| There are about 15 other analysts in the room with me. | |
| All of you out. | |
| You stay and proceeded to chew my ass for giving him an answer that he didn't want to hear. | |
| So that's, I'm still that person. | |
| Now, getting into you, so we get to Ukraine. | |
| You know, there's efforts to use Ukraine against Russia going back to the 17, 1800s with the Poles and others. | |
| The, you know, extended, of course, throughout the 20th century, always been this sort of borderlands region, literally means borderlands in the language. | |
| All of that, you know, escalates, you know, with the Banderite movement into the post-war, you know, Operation Gladio after World War II and our left-behind units there. | |
| And then we really goes on, you know, starts in the 70s and 80s here at Harvard, where the Ruthenians, as they used to call themselves, become the Ukrainian nationalist movement with a lot of little unfortunate neo-Nazi ties and actual Nazi ties, but they recreate this sort of fake history that the various problems that happened in the Soviet Union in terms of famines were just at Ukraine, just for the Ukrainians. | |
| But it was actually the Kazakhs and others who are actually the primary victims of that, particularly in Kazakhstan as it's now said. | |
| All of that, Jazz. | |
| So there's a longer, broader history, the kind that Putin could probably spend 20 hours on. | |
| Before we get into the Ukrainian corruption scandal that business partners of yours have helped identify, In the broader story, like we just finally released the conversations between George W. Bush and Putin. | |
| And what's striking to me, it's not surprising, but at a certain level, it's surprising, is just Putin's experience, like he detailed Oliver Stone and others, is he thinks American politicians might mean well, but as soon as they get into power, the men in gray suits arrive and they take over everything. | |
| And you can see that live time in the transcripts: that George W. Bush appears to be utterly clueless about almost everything Putin is talking about. | |
| He's trying to use these five minutes he gets with the president to give him a crash course in many history so he can understand geopolitical reality, like in the summer of 2001, saying you might want to pay attention to this Osama bin Laden guy. | |
| But whatever, that's all cool. | |
| Oh, you know, this dude's handling it. | |
| That guy's handling it. | |
| I mean, George W. Bush appears to not know, other than to be he's almost like the press spokesperson for the country, not the actual policymaker for the country. | |
| But in your experience, how much of that, like Putin's experience with the West has been incorrigible in competency and ineptitude when not outright malevolence. | |
| Go ahead. | |
| Well, no, I say it's been a little bit like I think of Vladimir Putin as Charlie Brown and the West as Lucy with the football. | |
| Okay. | |
| And except, you know, Vladimir has now learned that he can't, even if the West keeps offering a chance to kick the football, it's not a real offer, you know, because he has taken a couple of swings and misses. | |
| You know, what's fascinating is, you know, when he Putin was brought into office on August 9th of 1999 because of the start of the Second Chechen War, which had started really on August 7th. | |
| And I think the security establishments fear that Yeltsin was just not up to dealing with that. | |
| And it was over time that they learned that one of the biggest providers or people helping light that fire was the United States through the Central Intelligence Agency, but providing weapons, providing training, tapping into the same people that we'd used in Afghanistan to try to force the Soviets out of Afghanistan. | |
| And yet, in spite of that, Putin continued trying to establish good relations with the West and asked, you know, George W. Bush at least once, if not more, to join NATO, which was rebuffed. | |
| Because by God, if Russia joins NATO, how do we justify a trillion-dollar budget? | |
| We can't have that. | |
| It goes back to the slush fund of it. | |
| If Russia joins NATO, then what purpose does NATO even have to exist? | |
| Exactly. | |
| Although many people ask what purpose it has right now, other than to continue to fight Russia. | |
| Another thing that's always blown my mind here is people accuse Putin and Russia of what's the imperialistic global dominance, a country with a population of 150 million, which even if anybody believes that, they also believe that they're having trouble fighting Ukraine. | |
| And in all of their fears of global dominance, they push Russia towards China, which is the easiest way to ensure an alliance that will lead to global domination or global dominance. | |
| And Russia, having lived through communism, I would imagine they would want nothing to do with China. | |
| I mean, except in as much as it's economically useful, what is the rationale to continuing to vilify and push Russia into a corner where it has to ally with other nations and might indirectly lead to some form of global dominance? | |
| Well, that was a RAND corporation report that laid it out. | |
| And Aaron Wes Mitchell followed it up with a national interest article that was based on a paper he submitted to the Pentagon's Office of Policy Studies, or whatever. | |
| I forget the name of the particular office. | |
| He did that in 2020. | |
| The article was published in August 2021. | |
| They've always conceived of, you know, we're so blind in the West, and we see things only from our perspective, and we're incapable of, and we always paint it in terms of this narrative that is based on what I call psychological projection. | |
| So we perceive Russia and China as these imperialist powers, although history going back a thousand years shows, yeah, Russia has been worried about the countries on its periphery, but it has not been, it's never created an army that's been intended to sell around the world to conquer another territory. | |
| And yeah, it did march into Paris in 1815, but that was part of a broader European, you know, all the Europeans that hated Napoleon. | |
| And, you know, Russia went along for the ride to sort of pay back for the attack on Moscow. | |
| But Russia has never been this imperialist power. | |
| But our narrative, which was shaped in large part by the number of German SS officers that we took into the CIA and military intelligence after World War II, was that these Soviet communists were voracious. | |
| They didn't understand that the reason Russia kept Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, they needed a buffer state against the West because this was the third time in 150 years that they'd been attacked. | |
| Now, what sort of undercut that lie that Russia was the Soviet Union was this irredeemable imperialist aggressor is they gave Austria back to the Austrians for a pledge of that they'd be neutral. | |
| And the Soviets walked out. | |
| So that sort of destroyed that meme. | |
| And again, with China, recall that during World War II, when the Chinese, we had both the commies and the Kuomintang, they were fighting 70% of the Japanese army. | |
| 70% of the Japanese army was deployed on the mainland. | |
| We in the United States were fighting 30% out in the Pacific. | |
| Russia was providing military assistance not only to Mao and his crew, but to Chiang Kai-shek and his crew. | |
| Because Russia saw that as that China played an important role on its border. | |
| And even though they were not, you know, it wasn't, Asia is not a Christian nation. | |
| Russia is a Christian nation. | |
| This relationship actually goes back quite a while. | |
| So today, here they are recognizing that the West, particularly the United States, is doing nothing but threatening them, bullying them, trying to use economics as a club to defeat them. | |
| And it's just like, you know, what Benjamin Franklin said to my fifth grade uncle, you know, in the Constitution Hall up there in Pennsylvania. | |
| If we don't hang together, we'll all hang separately. | |
| And I think that's where Russia, Russia and China, one of the unexpected consequences of the special military operation and Western sanctions is it's pushed Russia and China together in a way that they might not naturally have come together this way. | |
| But they are now, they are firmly cemented together politically, economically, militarily, and diplomatically. | |
| Yeah, it might be go down as the greatest political debacle of the West by any metric or measurement. | |
| You don't have to agree with my own ideological inclinations. | |
| I think we should be allies with Russia for a wide range of reasons. | |
| But putting that aside, just as a matter of geopolitical reality, Nixon, I don't think, would have ever made this mistake, to give an example. | |
| Like, I don't, a lot of Nixon's moral compass, I don't trust. | |
| I definitely don't trust Henry Kissinger's moral compass, but at least they were smart enough to know, don't do something this stupid. | |
| But speaking of stupidity, part of what goes with stupidity is corruption. | |
| So, can you detail for people what the Ukrainian corruption scandal is, just the latest one that you have knowledge of and how it ties in to certain prominent United States politicians? | |
| Yeah, so about eight months ago, I call him my business partner. | |
| We're not really still active. | |
| You know, I'm 70. | |
| I'm doing, you know, I'm doing nothing. | |
| I'm doing this. | |
| I'm doing this and I'm a firearms instructor. | |
| So I'm not out running around the world like I used to. | |
| But he was approached by some whistleblowers out of Ukraine and they brought a long documentary evidence. | |
| Now, my business partner, when he ran the undercover money laundering operations in New York City, he brought 188 cases. | |
| Not one of them went to trial. | |
| They all pled out. | |
| The reason they pled out is because the evidence was so overwhelming. | |
| They didn't want to run the risk of going to trial and getting a lot more years. | |
| So they would always be willing to make a deal. | |
| So he applies that same methodology. | |
| And out of it, what he told me is they got $48 billion identified. | |
| And that's with documentary evidence, with eyewitness testimony, bank records. | |
| And they keep uncovering more. | |
| When I first talked to him, he said they had identified 23 members of Congress. | |
| And the last time I chatted with him, it was up to 29. | |
| And so that's members of the Senate and the House. | |
| And he mentioned two names in particular: Lindsey Graham and Chuck Schumer, that they've received multiple millions of dollars that have been put into accounts that they have access to and control. | |
| So, you know, when you've pilfered $48 billion, yeah, you spread the love around a little bit. | |
| Now, it's all, and it's all gone through Baltic banks, you know, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia. | |
| Well, that goes back to me. | |
| Kayakalis' father was a famous commie banker there in Estonia. | |
| Larry, she corrected the history. | |
| Russia's never been invaded. | |
| Russia only invades other places. | |
| I had no idea the Russians invaded Nazi Germany. | |
| Russia invaded Napoleon, France. | |
| I didn't get the Kaya Kaya Kalis version of world history. | |
| But it's no coincidence. | |
| The Baltics are incredibly belligerent, but that they are in on the scam. | |
| The more you dig, it seems to me that some part of this is ideological indoctrination. | |
| Some of this is globalism on steroids, that Russia was supposed to be the broken up, tiny little mini states. | |
| The global is supposed to run it. | |
| Soros is supposed to rape it blind. | |
| And, you know, the Clinton Foundation was really established so that they could rob Russia blind. | |
| And Hillary has never given up her bitterness about Vladimir shutting that door. | |
| But another part of it is this is just grift. | |
| Like I think right now with Zelensky, and half of what he's doing is, how do we keep the grift going? | |
| How do we keep it three more months, six more months, one more year? | |
| It has nothing even to do with ideology. | |
| A lot of these people are just lying in their pockets. | |
| Yeah, exactly right. | |
| But Larry, quick question. | |
| It's about the Chuck Schumer, Lindsey Graham. | |
| I mean, getting what's the nature of the money, the mechanism through which they're getting it, the pretext under which they're getting it, and how much is it? | |
| The number I was told for Lindsay was 19 million, and the number for Schumer was 26 million. | |
| Over what period of time? | |
| Last couple of years, last two or three years. | |
| And for what? | |
| For consulting fees, advances on books? | |
| Like, how do they even to make sure that they are enthusiastic supporters of the war in Ukraine? | |
| You know, the money, you know, what Robert's talking about is the key. | |
| And I haven't, you know, we wrongly look at Zelensky as if he's the political force in this, the political power. | |
| He's the organ grinder's monkey, okay? | |
| We've got to find out who the organ grinder or grinders are. | |
| I believe I don't have any evidence of this to proffer, but I think it's tied into the whole neo-Nazi banderite group. | |
| They're the ones that ultimately are directing this. | |
| And Zelensky is just a useful tool. | |
| His usefulness has been, he's been an attractive face that the West likes that would provide, throw money at him. | |
| You know, think of him as a male stripper. | |
| Okay. | |
| Well, he might play that role for Lindsey Graham. | |
| But I mean, yeah, he's literally an actor. | |
| He was an actor who's trained to do this. | |
| In fact, I thought early on that he was read, like he would read, he would be on different scripts on the same day. | |
| You know, one day pro-West, another day anti-West, pro-Russian, anti-Russian. | |
| It was wild, but he was just, okay, here's my script. | |
| Let's go. | |
| Oh, here's my script. | |
| Let's go. | |
| And he's very much that figurehead. | |
| And there was a recent article in Responsible Statecraft by a author that was also on with our mutual friend Davis. | |
| George Beebe or it was a woman. | |
| What's Jennifer Kavanaugh? | |
| Is it Kavanaugh? | |
| Yes, Jennifer Kavanaugh. | |
| That's it. | |
| And she said she was over there. | |
| And the entire Ukrainian elite basically is delusional that they think that they can come. | |
| And I think part of the corruption scandal is you have these sort of middle-class progressive era U.S. type personalities who really believe in ideologically the war on Russia. | |
| And so they think this corruption undermines the purity of their mission. | |
| And I think Alexander McCorris is right about this is an internal fight in Ukraine that's exposing this corruption. | |
| There may be on the peace side or the Russia rapprochement side of the U.S. alignment with those forces. | |
| I mean, they kept talking about, I get all the names butchered, so I won't even try, but the Ukrainian official that was here, supposedly negotiating, and instead he's meeting with Kash Patel and Dan Bongino. | |
| And it's like, hmm, what's that about? | |
| Was that Umaroff? | |
| Umaroff? | |
| Yeah, Umaroff. | |
| And it makes you wonder whether they're bargaining for their immunity. | |
| But the best way they could get immunity from prosecution is to rat out Lindsey Graham, rat out Chuck Schumer, rat out these guys that have been lining their pockets by war whoring all around the world. | |
| I mean, I don't think Lindsey Graham's been a war he doesn't want us to get involved with. | |
| I mean, right now, he would like us to be at war with China, Venezuela, Russia, and Orangut. | |
| It's like, how many wars are we going to do at the same time just to line his pockets in his pals pockets? | |
| And the South Carolina Defense Industry. | |
| Let's go back and look at the role of the Baltic states. | |
| You remember when Hunter Biden got on to Burisma? | |
| He brought another fellow on board as a board member, fellow named Kofer Black. | |
| Well, Kofer used to be the head of the counterterrorism center out at CIA when 9-11 occurred. | |
| Prior to that, he was the chief of station in Sedan back in August of 94 when they captured Carlos the Jackal. | |
| And then after he left the CIA and moved to State Department, was in my old office as the coordinator for counterterrorism or ambassador for counterterrorism. | |
| And then he gets out and he gets on burisma. | |
| But at the same time, he's on burisma, he's also placed as a board member of one of the Baltic banks because of his, quote, expertise with terrorist financing. | |
| Now, the irony there is that a year after he joined that bank, that bank got busted for money laundering. | |
| You know, so much for his expertise on that front. | |
| But again, you got to ask, what's a CIA guy with that kind of background doing on the board of a Baltic bank? | |
| And then when we find out these Baltic banks were the funnel, the money comes out of Ukraine, goes into the Baltic banks, and then feeds into the usual suspects offshore in the Caribbean and Panama and other places. | |
| Then, yeah, again, I don't believe in coincidence. | |
| Yeah, I mean, no doubt about it. | |
| Now, going from one hotspot of the corruption that has embedded us in Ukraine, you have a good phrase for Venezuela, as that is, we don't know what's going to happen. | |
| It's like the Donald Trump reality show. | |
| Tune in next Wednesday. | |
| Do we go to nuclear war or not? | |
| You know, it's that kind of thing. | |
| But you said Venezuelan is Spanish for Vietnam. | |
| Can you explain to people what are all of the risks of us going into Venezuela? | |
| So I can explain it. | |
| Puedo espicar en español siquieri, or I'll just do it in English. | |
| Well, by the way, to your empire argument, I like to tell people, it's like, tell me all the people outside of Russia that speak Russian. | |
| Now tell me all the people in, say, Europe, Africa, or Latin America or somewhere else that speak either English, French, German, or Spanish. | |
| Because it's spoken somewhere around the world. | |
| Russian is not. | |
| That tells you who is and isn't an empire. | |
| Russia and Chinese. | |
| Exactly. | |
| Excellent, you know, excellent observation. | |
| Look, so part of my assessment of this, you know, one, I was the regional analyst for Central America, but I did have some experience with Venezuela during my days at the agency. | |
| And then over the years where we were investigating like product counterfeiting, made a couple of different trips into Venezuela because there were like Sunbeam Oster products that were being shipped through locations there. | |
| But Venezuela is three times the size, landmass, of Vietnam. | |
| So it's three times larger. | |
| And it's just like Vietnam in terms of triple canopy jungle and mountains. | |
| And, you know, it's not easy terrain. | |
| Just someone, do a Google map, go on and look at the road from the airport, which is out on the coast, and then the road that runs up into Caracas. | |
| Good luck with transiting that if we decide to go to war. | |
| The notion that Venezuela has been this gigantic source of international narcotics is just, it's crap. | |
| Yeah, they've been a transit point, primarily for marijuana and some cocaine. | |
| They've been a transit point. | |
| That's quite different from being a producer like in Colombia and Mexico. | |
| And again, over the course of working with my partners, I mean, Bobby Nieves, he was the one that came up with what's known as the kingpin program. | |
| There was a period in the late 80s, early 90s, where we thought that if we just take out the heads of these narcotics organizations, that'll force them to collapse. | |
| They didn't realize that that was like hitting a ball of mercury with a hammer. | |
| It scatters, but it stays intact in all these different sub-organizations. | |
| So, you know, and Bobby came to realize, it was a good idea, but that didn't work. | |
| I did work in Mexico when we did our tobacco case. | |
| We had a Cali cartel informant and a Senaloa cartel informant that worked with us. | |
| So, you know, I've got some entrance into that world. | |
| Venezuela is not the problem. | |
| The problem is primarily Mexico, followed by Colombia and then China to a lesser extent. | |
| I brought up the map. | |
| I just want to add it again because in terms of anything, I'm going to ask the obvious question: Is this threat of going to war with Venezuela not what people refer to as the literal distraction because things are going a little sideways elsewhere? | |
| It's in terms of migration, does it play any meaningful role in the illegal immigration that comes up through the Darien Gap? | |
| No, no, I mean, yeah, it's not because that's Colombia, not Venezuela. | |
| Yeah, that's what that's all about. | |
| That's why Colombia, I've changed the map location. | |
| I can't get back to my screen here because we're talking about like Colombia, we know, is the coke producer of the world. | |
| I'm just wondering to what degree Venezuela is also involved in that, that it would be the target and not Colombia, other than there being political reasons. | |
| It's not where the migrants are coming through. | |
| And so, what's the rationale even to utter this other than regime change for a sympathetic president of the country? | |
| Or is the ultimate distraction like when Bill Clinton was getting impeached for the BJs? | |
| You know, he goes and bombs a factory and I think it was Sudan. | |
| So, like, is this either the deep state war whores who want another angle of another war, or is it an administration that might be having its own hiccups saying this would be the good distraction? | |
| Well, this actually started in 2018 during Trump's first term. | |
| Because I started doing some research when I heard, you know, they started talking about Trend de Aragua. | |
| And I'm going, where the hell did that come from? | |
| And then discovered that Trend de Aragua first surfaces in news reports that are planted in Peru and Argentina, I believe, in 2018. | |
| Now, that tells me right away that was a CIA op. | |
| You know, I did some time when I was with the agency working what they call covert action programs where you're feeding information into systems. | |
| So that had all the hallmarks, in my view, of the sudden appearance of this group, and particularly a group that's in Venezuela, but you're publicizing it in Peru. | |
| Huh, that's interesting. | |
| So I think this is part of a CIA narrative. | |
| And in fact, in 2018, again, I don't have access to the classified information. | |
| I stopped using my clearances back in 2017, 2016. | |
| The fact that I'm sure Donald Trump wrote a CIA finding to overthrow Maduro in 2018, and that this activity was just part of that. | |
| This is when we saw the, you know, Juan Cuaido emerges as the preferred candidate. | |
| And that I think when Trump left office, that finding was still in place. | |
| I'm not sure how much emphasis it got during the Biden administration, but they continued to heap on sanctions against Maduro. | |
| And now Trump comes back in and hey, you know, game on again. | |
| What's so odd about this is they can't seem to settle on a narrative. | |
| First, it's the narco-terrorist narrative. | |
| Then at the same time, I don't know if you saw that Gary Burnson, he's a former CIA officer. | |
| He's the one that wrote the book Jawbreaker and a New York former New York Times reporter, Ralph Pizzullo. | |
| They're all pushing this story about, no, no, Venezuela was central to the Dominion machine and stealing elections around the world. | |
| And, you know, that's a whole load of crap. | |
| Yes, the Dominion machine can be manipulated. | |
| Yes, but the 26, 2020 election was stolen the old-fashioned way. | |
| Pre-printed ballots that were printed in Long Island, New York, and shipped out over a couple of months all over the country. | |
| Millions of ballots that had Joe Biden in, and they were fed into the machines, but that's where it happens. | |
| You know, so but you know, they're trying to say, Oh, we need to go after Venezuela because they're this rogue state uh interfering with the elections. | |
| Uh, and now, no, no, no, it's it's the Chinese influence, Chinese and Iran and Russian. | |
| It's Monroe Doctrine. | |
| So, well, it's half a Monroe doctrine because you know, I'm sure as Robert can explain more eloquently than can I, uh, the Monroe Doctorate had two sides: one, foreigners, keep your hands off of us, and you know what? | |
| We'll keep our hands to ourselves and not bother you. | |
| Well, we don't like to read that last part because we are constantly meddling in other countries, so um, I'm not sure what the real reason is, but whatever it is, it's it's not going to be effective because you know we blow things up. | |
| We learned trying to blow up Saddam Hussein. | |
| How did that work out? | |
| You didn't get Saddam Hussein changed from power until we put Delta Force in on the ground, and it was Delta Force that captured Saddam Hussein. | |
| And once we captured and got rid of him, problems solved, right? | |
| Oh, no, no, problems continued. | |
| In fact, got a little worse. | |
| So, Venezuela, you know, when you compare in Vietnam at the height of our involvement in April of 1969, we had 543,000 troops in Vietnam, and we could not control the country, we couldn't defeat them. | |
| And yet, we've got 18,000 troops now lined up potentially to do something in Venezuela. | |
| We haven't learned, we don't learn from history. | |
| And speaking of which, can you explain like the other factors is beyond Venezuela and the Maduro regime, you have all of the like up in the jungles, is mostly uncontrolled territory still by the Colombian and the Venezuelan governments. | |
| I know Patrick Lancaster was there, he was looking nervous. | |
| He was like, I didn't plan on being exactly this location. | |
| You know, this guy's been in the middle of the Ukrainian battlefields, and you can tell he's eager to get out of there. | |
| He got sick just on the speaking of the road you were talking about, he took one of those roads up there. | |
| He's like, Everybody's vomiting because of how crazy just to travel a bus. | |
| Yeah, but you've got FARC, you've got left-wing rebels, you've got right-wing rebels, you've got old death squads, you've got drug runners, you've got arms runners, you've got human traffickers that largely dominate this huge jungle region. | |
| And you could have Venezuela spill over into Colombia that could spill over in all kinds of ways. | |
| And then you would have an immigration crisis because then you have another refugee crisis like we've had over and over again. | |
| That all of a sudden, Trump, in the name of controlling the border, unleashes and opens the border because people have no choice after they're fleeing these war-torn regions. | |
| I mean, people forget that's why we have a lot of El Salvadoran and Guatemalan and Honduran immigrants to begin with is because of the 1950s overthrowing their governments, destabilizing the region, leading to a rise of gain control that has led to them having no choice but to flee into the United States of America. | |
| Our immigration problem is largely a product, not entirely, but largely a product of destabilization in Central and South America. | |
| So, why we would, for the guy whose number one issue was stopping immigration and controlling the borders, wanting to unleash the very cause of that open border policy is beyond me, other than Narco Marco and all of his little ambitions. | |
| But the yeah, could you explain how the kind of groups that are there that have been there for a long time could be an that any destabilizing action towards any government in this region could unleash a nightmare of violent chaos and a flood of refugees into the United States? | |
| Yeah, no, you've got these very, very long borders of both Colombia and Brazil that are, you know, again, you're out in the middle of jungle and it's not easy to control. | |
| If the Trump administration is, you know, now they're talking about putting an embargo, a naval blockade on Venezuela. | |
| All that does is you got never underestimate the entrepreneurial power. of a lot of these people that live out there in the jungle. | |
| They find opportunity, man. | |
| So all of a sudden, you can't bring it into port, but by God, we can bring it across the border. | |
| And go back and look. | |
| Colombia's been fighting the FARC for at least 50 years and haven't been able to contain them or defeat them in part because they can always get across the border and safe haven in Venezuela. | |
| They can go, you know, RR there. | |
| So the only hope that the United States would have of possibly controlling that would require a deployment of probably a million soldiers. | |
| Well, we only got 470,000 right now in the Army, so we're a little shy right now. | |
| Give us some time to work up to that. | |
| This the linkages between so-called these revolutionary groups and the criminal gangs that are making money and the government officials and the military. | |
| It is a recipe for chaos. | |
| And that's what frightens me is what I know about our history of not planning for the, you know, we like when we went into Iraq in 2003, there was zero planning. | |
| Yeah, General Garner did some, but they were quickly displaced by El Paul Bremer, Jerry Bremer. | |
| And Jerry and I used to be friends, but because of my stance on the war in Iraq, that friendship ended. | |
| But I tried, when he was named to become, you know, the pubah of Baghdad, I called him up and tried to say, hey, let me connect you with Pat Lang, because Pat was the last U.S. government official to hand carry intelligence to the Iraqi army during the Iran-Iraq war. | |
| He was involved with helping the Iraqis plan their final offensive against Iran, defense attaché in Saudi Arabia and Yemen, new Arabic. | |
| He set up the Arabic program at West Point, taught there for two years with his wife, Marguerite. | |
| So he knew a thing or two about the Middle East. | |
| And when I offered him up to Bremer, Bremer goes, no, I don't need to talk to him. | |
| And Jerry didn't know a damn thing about Iraq. | |
| So that was that lack of planning. | |
| And if you think that there's been, quote, intense planning on this, no. | |
| I mean, I had another friend who was, he was put in charge of the Iran task force in like 2007. | |
| And again, when they came, they were literally planning to launch military, U.S. military operations in Iran. | |
| And he asked the question, he goes, okay, we do this. | |
| What next? | |
| And the answer was, don't worry about it. | |
| It'll work out. | |
| That's our consistent answer on all of these. | |
| Larry, I got two questions. | |
| One is, I'll start with the easy one. | |
| For all this talk about the drugs being the issue, what do you make of Trump pardoning the former Honduran presidents who was convicted on drug trafficking? | |
| I mean, some people say they want that so that he could spill the beans. | |
| I don't know, you know, work to their political advantage. | |
| Others say it's just, you know, abject hypocrisy. | |
| Do you see any strategic reason for doing it? | |
| And what do you make of it? | |
| No, I'm with the abject hypocrisy crowd. | |
| Well, most likely there are somebody who's made financial contributions to the Trump campaign has also got a relationship with that guy. | |
| And that's how you get in front of people. | |
| I mean, you've heard, I'm sure you've heard John Kiriaku's story when he tried to get a pardon and Rudy Giuliani tried to shake him down for what was it, a million, two million dollars? | |
| So, which is which is cheap compared to what they're paying right now, by the way. | |
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| So, this is the again, the notion that these guys are playing 3D chess, forget about it. | |
| We've been, you know, we've my partner and I, we went in and briefed the Joint Special Operations Command back in 2006 because they were looking for this guy, Mukhtar Bel Mukhtar, who is the head of al-Qaeda up in North Africa. | |
| And they kept reporting like every couple of months that they'd killed him. | |
| The guy had nine lives, you know, kept coming back. | |
| But his main business, he had two business lines: stolen vehicles and cigarettes. | |
| And his favorite brand to sell, Philip Morris, Marlborough. | |
| So we explained to JSOC: this is how you find these cigarettes. | |
| It's not like mana from God, you know, to the children of Israel. | |
| They wake up outside their tent. | |
| Oh, cigarettes. | |
| You know, God left them overnight. | |
| You know, the cigarette ferry. | |
| No, they're sold through a mechanism and process, and Philip Morris executives know exactly. | |
| And instead, JSOC, they ignored us. | |
| You know, so following the money is something you can do, but it does require some work. | |
| As we wrap up, how do you foresee if Trump avoids Venezuela, avoids escalation in Ukraine, versus if he doesn't? | |
| In other words, what that sort of map looks like. | |
| What do you think is likely to happen over the next six months or so in that regard? | |
| And then tell people, share with people the different sites they can follow you in terms of your seminar 21 blog and other locations as we go forward. | |
| Because again, for those people new to Larry, fantastic analysis, excellent analysis. | |
| Also, some people, what I would call the anti-empire, anti-deep state world are ideologically tied to being like anti-American. | |
| You get this like America bad, America, you know, all this stuff. | |
| Larry's not one of those people, having come from the, like my family, from the founding generation of this country. | |
| So the, but can you, yeah, where people can follow you and what do you think is going to happen over the next three? | |
| Are we going to get good Trump or bad Trump over the next three to six months? | |
| Yeah, I fear we're getting bad Trump. | |
| And, you know, I look, I voted for the guy. | |
| So, you know, you can blame me for how it's worked out. | |
| Ukraine, he is trying to extricate himself from Ukraine. | |
| But as we saw, that what the attempt to, the so-called attempt to kill Putin, I think it was more of an attempt to kill Zelensky in terms of his, you know, to try to, they've pulled off that attack about the same time that Trump and Zelensky were meeting. | |
| So that's why I don't think it was Zelensky that pulled that off. | |
| The war in Ukraine is going to be lost. | |
| And Ukraine, I think it will be definitely over by the end of 2026, maybe sooner, because the Russian army is dramatically increased in size. | |
| The Russians are taking steps to prepare for war with Europe. | |
| Not that they intend to attack Europe, but they're listening to what the Europeans are saying, and they're not going to be caught with their pants down. | |
| They're stepping up, building up to be able to retaliate if the Europeans follow through on those threats. | |
| This will bring about, I think, the dissolution of NATO because NATO is going to be exposed as a completely inept, incompetent organization. | |
| The notion that there's going to be a peace deal between Ukraine and Russia ain't going to happen. | |
| This is the only deal that will be worked out will be one similar to what Von Paula signed with the Russians after his defeat at Stalingrad. | |
| It's going to be a military defeat. | |
| We'll see Russia take control of Kyiv and Odessa and Nikolaev at a minimum before this is over. | |
| And there's not a lot the West can do about it. | |
| Well, there's actually nothing the West can do about it unless they want to start a nuclear war. | |
| And even if they start a nuclear war, the West will come out on, you know, nobody will come out well on that, but the West will be completely devastated. | |
| So that's insane. | |
| Similarly, with Venezuela, if Trump moves forward with military action trying to remove Maduro, you're going to, that country is going to become ungovernable. | |
| And you will have a new insurgency that will then get the United States bogged out there. | |
| And then last but not least, we can't keep our hands off of Iran. | |
| And we're going to find that Iran is far better prepared now, if attacked, than it was prior to June 13th of 2025. | |
| Prior to 2025, they rejected offers of assistance from both China and Russia. | |
| Then after that 12-day war, they went back sort of sheepishly. | |
| Can we be friends? | |
| And Russia and China have stepped up significantly. | |
| So I write about all of this at sonar21.com. | |
| That's the best place to find me. | |
| Larry, I'm going to pull that up afterwards, but send me all the links so I can put them in the pinned comments. | |
| And it'll be in the pinned comment here. | |
| Let me just get a couple of tip questions that we have here. | |
| What part of this has to do with money owed the oil companies by Venezuela because they lost in arbitration? | |
| Asks Piran. | |
| I think it's a great, great question. | |
| I would say probably 90% of it. | |
| That would explain it. | |
| And we've got King of Biltong says, Premium Biltong, high protein, keto-friendly. | |
| Check it out. | |
| It's Biltong USA. | |
| Over in our locals community, there were a couple of tipped questions that were on point. | |
| We got difficult run says, on another podcast, Larry stated he believed Pakistani intelligence was involved in the murder of Seth Rich. | |
| I find this interesting given Barack Obama and his mother's connection to Pakistan. | |
| Can you provide more information? | |
| I hadn't heard that, Larry. | |
| Yeah, yeah. | |
| Well, so we go back and look at the investigation of Seth Rich. | |
| There are emails that I've worked with the attorney, Ty Clevenger, who was involved with one of the people being sued by the family of Seth Rich. | |
| And we uncovered a whole batch of emails from the Washington field office of the FBI to Peter Strzok, who was in counterintelligence at the FBI. | |
| Now, we're told that Seth Rich was killed and a robbery gone wrong, just, you know, urban crime. | |
| FBI has no jurisdiction over that. | |
| None at all. | |
| FBI can't just show up and say, oh, yeah, we're here. | |
| There's no federal predicate for it. | |
| But by God, you had the Federal Bureau of Investigation all over that. | |
| In addition, I learned through the same source that tipped me off about the Russia gate. | |
| He told we did get, Ty Clevenger did get a letter from the NSA confirming that they had like eight documents, top secret documents with the pertaining to Seth Rich. | |
| And my buddy said they're lying. | |
| There's lots more, lots more. | |
| So, I mean, what happened in that whole story is that the NSA, GCHQ, CIA, everybody found out that Seth Rich had passed information to Wikileaks, that because they were intercepting everything going in and out of there, they found that out. | |
| They created the storyline from May 26th until June 10th that this was Russia engaged, you know, Russia stole it. | |
| That that was the birth of Russiagate, that that was a complete fabricated story. | |
| That's with CrowdStrike cooperating with the FBI and with the CIA. | |
| But the reason the reason I say Pakistani intelligence is because Imran Awan, who was he controlled a lot of the servers on the for the Democrats and the Democrat National Committee. | |
| And it was an intelligence operation by Pakistan's ISI. | |
| And I think Pakistan ISI was intent on trying to shut down Rich for fear that. | |
| it get exposed. | |
| Because what happened is in august uh, Awan got arrested. | |
| It turns out he was. | |
| He was an FBI asset, his whole family, they were on the payroll, but just a lot of corruption in that whole thing. | |
| So that long answers to a short question. | |
| That's very interesting. | |
| And Pauliellis, thanks for inviting brilliant, brave truth teller Larry C Johnson on. | |
| Thanks Larry, i've read and listened to you ever since you began writing your wise analyses on the NO Quarter site. | |
| I was crushed when you closed it and thrilled when you came back with the COLD PAT LANG site to all right, and now listen to your wisdom whenever you're on. | |
| So i'm overjoyed to see you here on Robert AND Vivan Barnes and I think um, you got that Twice. | |
| Thank you, Drip Drop says Larry. | |
| Do Western countries allow refugees into their countries due to guilt they feel on account of military action? | |
| Or are refugees part of a script used by ruling elites to sell their populations and continued military action? | |
| Let in the good guys to keep them safe while we attack the bad guys who are trying to kill them? | |
| Well, i'm not sure we've ever distinguished between good and bad guys because, as you know my, my former colleague at CIA, Susan Miller, said on the with Afshan Rattansi, hey, we're working with Al-Qaeda and ISIS. | |
| So I thought they were bad guys. | |
| But we seem to find ways to align with them when we decide our interests align with them. | |
| I think it's a combination of the two. | |
| Some of it is guilt, but some of it is also just how we continue to use people for our own national objectives, which we never really clearly define. | |
| No, I mean, it's also all the money in terms of laundering that goes into these NGOs and organizations that are in charge of migration. | |
| And also, I think in Canada, using them as the next generation of liberal voters, because when you've, you know, you need to import a vote that you can't convince from your local population. | |
| And if they engage in some domestic terror, all the better, because now you have an excuse for the domestic security state with a constant, continuous, unknown threat that's just lingering out there. | |
| Larry, just briefly, what do you think of us? | |
| First Syrian president we have to the White House is a founding member of ISIS. | |
| I mean, a guy who had a $10 million bounty who carried people's heads around and he chopped off. | |
| We literally invited a head chopper into the White House. | |
| Yeah, it certainly disturbed the narrative of that we were fighting terrorism. | |
| I'm not sure at what point Al-Jalani, aka Al-Shadra, became a CIA and or MI6 asset, but at some point he did. | |
| And again, this is how the intelligence community, when you're into these operational roles, forget about conventional morality. | |
| Right and wrong go out the window. | |
| What do you need to do to get the project accomplished? | |
| And, you know, I mean, one of, I've got a friend. | |
| He was a bishop in the Mormon church. | |
| And one of his jobs as a case officer was taking a source from this one country, one of his assets. | |
| The guy's dream was to go to Vegas and have a threesome with hookers. | |
| It's my nightmare. | |
| Here's the Mormon bishop walking around, you know, the Bellagio trying to line up two hookers for his asset. | |
| People don't think that STDs exist. | |
| I don't understand it. | |
| Paulie Ellis is, I think you've seen the movie The Sandbaggers about MI6, CIA, Hijinks Kaldiggi. | |
| I've never seen it. | |
| I'm going to actually maybe screenshot this. | |
| And then last one, FYI, when was Chinese native to, I guess I meant Tibet, in a Mongolia or the Zhenjang province? | |
| Larry? | |
| Yeah, I'm not sure on that. | |
| No, I'm not sure the point is. | |
| Yeah, I refer him to Pepe Escobar. | |
| Pepe has just made the journey across the old and new Silk Road. | |
| Oh, wow. | |
| That'd be a fascinating review. | |
| Yeah, remarkable. | |
| He shot a documentary. | |
| I'm not sure it'll be out shortly. | |
| But yeah, cool. | |
| They'd be like, you know, Alex Christoforo does his, you know, walking around while he's touring stuff. | |
| It'd be interesting if you ever went to like the old Silk Road and did some of that. | |
| I'd be fascinated. | |
| Somehow, cats will find him either way. | |
| That's one thing I know because there's always cats in Alex's video. | |
| Thanks, Larry. | |
| This was fantastic. | |
| Highly recommend Sonar 21. | |
| Catch Larry wherever he's at various. | |
| He's on with the Drain. | |
| He's on with The Deep Dive with Lieutenant Colonel Davis and then on a range of other podcast channels. | |
| Of course, and then just be doubly careful because there's all these AI fakes coming out. | |
| Even Alexander, of course, got taken in by one of the things. | |
| No, I was watching one literally earlier and I watched things at 2x. | |
| So I'm looking at this. | |
| I was like, man, even at double speed, the emotions don't look totally human. | |
| I slow it down to one speed. | |
| I was like, this is AI. | |
| And then the disclaimer was in the description. | |
| Yeah, a huge one with Mearsheimer, by the way. | |
| There's like this Mearsheimer channel. | |
| It sounds very sophisticated. | |
| I was like, I don't think Mearsheimer said that. | |
| So, you know, keep an eye out on the, well, maybe it's the ultimate privilege when they're AIing us everywhere. | |
| I think somebody AI me as a breaking bad lawyer. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Like one of my defenses. | |
| You know, the so we'll see. | |
| But it's been awesome. | |
| Everybody follow Larry at Sonar21. | |
| Larry will say our goodbyes after we opt out. | |
| Sure. | |
| Larry, thank you, everyone. | |
| Godspeed. | |
| God bless. | |
| See you tomorrow. |