Judging Freedom - DOJ & Ukraine - Where_s the Truth_ Larry Johnson fmr CIA

Episode Date: May 12, 2023

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Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Friday, May 12, 2023. It's about 2.15 in the afternoon here on the East Coast of the United States. Larry Johnson joins us again this week. Larry, it's a pleasure. Thank you for coming back here. You have recently, I mean, this should be front page news, but I'll let you explain it. You have recently unearthed some information due to the dogged research by our former colleague, Catherine Herridge, with whom you've worked in the past, and I was pleased to work at Fox, and due to your extraordinary knowledge of firearms, concerning the Jack DeShera case. Just to remind everybody, Jack DeShera is the 21-year-old,

and the reason I have to remind everybody is because this isn't in the news anymore, because it's such a black eye to the government. We'll get to that in a minute. But Jack Teixeira is the 21-year-old Massachusetts National Guardsman whom the government claims is the sole source for the release of classified documents, the authenticity and accuracy of which the government has yet to challenge and which reveal, among other things, the government's belief that Ukraine is seriously and badly losing this war and that in another three weeks in early June, Ukraine's air defenses will be degraded down to zero. Okay, that's who Jack Teixeira is. He's locked up without bail. A judge is trying to decide whether or not he should get bail. And the government is making an argument, which you'll explain to us. And then you can tell us how absurd and without evidence the government's argument is.

Sure. The pictures that emerged out of the when he was brought into court and the government laid out its case. And one of the things he introduced into evidence was, oh, judge, we found in his bedroom, he had all this military gear, all this. And they specifically mentioned army, fatigues, a gas mask and a weapons cache. I think they used the word arsenal, didn't they? Yes, and weapons cache. So that's not like one isolated firearm. And so, you know, I remember reading that, seeing that, reading it from Catherine's report

and thinking, oh boy, they're going all out to get this kid. All right, what are we looking at now? Is that his bedroom? Yeah, that's his bedroom? Yeah, that's his bedroom. And laid out there on the table in front are some of that cache of weapons. Well, if everybody will notice at the very tip, they have an orange tip on the barrel. Well, that means it's an airsoft firearm. It's not a real gun. It does not fire bullets.

It's a toy. It is the kind of thing that 18, 19, 20-year-olds, some little older, they dress up in military gear. They get these guns, shoot what is basically a round plastic capsule. And if you don't have glasses on, it could cause some eye damage if it hits you in the eye, just like the Christmas story. You get shot in the eye with a BB gun. But otherwise, it could leave a bruise. It doesn't kill. It is not a deadly weapon. And yet, here's the government lying.

They absolutely lied about this young man. And it's either incompetence on the part of the FBI, or it is just absolute criminal activity on their part to completely misrepresent what this was. Are these guns, since they're toys, do you even have to get a permit to own them and register them at the stadium? Buy them at a toy store. Yeah. Yeah. The people that sell these, they are required by law to make sure that if they sell them, they have to have that orange tip because they are designed to be very they look very realistic and you could see so, you know There have been instances where kids with these these

Firearms in hand or these I call them faux firearms Have been shot and killed by police because the police mistakenly took them for a real firearm So, you know, you think it's a whole nother issue. Should you have toys like this? But the fact of the matter is these particular faux firearms are designed for guys that like to dress up in military gear run around in the woods shoot at each other playing combat without running any risk of their uh losing their life or being made so So the FBI sent about 25 agents, but they looked like soldiers.

I don't know if we still have the picture of that arrest, Gary, but they sent about 25 of these guys in military gear, carrying automatic weapons, not semi-automatic, automatic weapons. The FBI guys show up at his house with machine guns. You would think they would have done a search first with the massachusetts authorities to see what he owned and would have come up with zero yeah well and honestly believe that these things were real ar-15s and ar-17s and ak one of it looks like an AK-47 with that bent magazine or Russian guns? It is.

No, it is. It is an AK-47 replica. The people that are arrested that went on scene in the military gear that took Tuxera, they're part of the FBI SWAT team. So they are specifically designed for that mission. The ones who actually went into his house to investigate that found the weapons cache, those are regular agents who aren't walking around in that kind of military gear. And there's only two conclusions, Judge. Either they deliberately lied to the judge about the nature of those firearms or the faux firearms, or they're so damn stupid, they didn't understand that they were not real weapons. Now, I'm not sure which of those is worse. Larry, which is worse, stupidity or lying? And you're talking about

serious lying. You're not talking about was it five after two or was it six after two? You're talking about lies told in federal court to a federal judge used to incarcerate an innocent person. He's innocent until proven guilty. Correct. Yeah. And so in my book, the line's worse than stupidity. You can correct stupidity with education, but you can't correct this kind of moral corruption. And that's what's at stake here because they're painting this kid as a terrorist

and he's anything but. In fact, once they admitted that they found army gear in his room, the kid's in the Air Force. They don't wear army fatigues. So that was further evidence in my book that he was one of these weekend warriors that would play airsoft combat. He would dress up in the army gear. That was also the purpose of what

they called the gas mask. It's a face protector. You put it over your face so you don't get punched in the, you know, hit in the mouth with one of those paint balls, essentially, is what they're shooting. So here's the question. Why? Why has the government painted this 24-year-old kid as the sole person responsible for the distribution of top secret documents, documents prepared for the Joint Chiefs of Staff documents the authenticity of which and the accuracy of which the government has never challenged. Why are they blaming him and why such a heavy push on him? The role of the scapegoat judge, it goes back centuries. You know, you've got to find somebody to put the blame on so that the people who are

actually bearing the heaviest responsibility avoid that blame. The reality is within the U.S. intelligence community, they have enough systems and capabilities in place to monitor this kind of unusual activity. And in fact, there is some evidence that's appeared at least in the newspaper reports that the British and the NSA, so the British GCHQ, which we talked about before, and their U.S. equivalent, NSA, actually had identified this prior to the alleged discovery of the leaks. And so that this was being monitored and nothing was done. Where was his chain of command this kid was not in there by himself he had both non-commissioned officers and commissioned officers supposed to supervise and monitor what he was doing there was a complete breakdown of the system and when you look at what this kid was doing it is pretty clear to me now, he was not out acting on behalf of any foreign country.

He was just showing off for some friends, making himself look like a big man. Correct. He wasn't even a Daniel Ellsberg or a Julian Assange or a Bradley slash Chelsea Manning did it for ideological reasons who believe that the government had committed war crimes and the public had the right to know about it. He's just boasting, how dumb this was, boasting to a chat room filled with people that he didn't even know, that he had never even met. That's the limited crowd to which he was being boastful. And the government wants to paint him as the sole person of all. I'm still scratching my head. You went to war to get your top security clearance.

Phil Giraldi did. Scott Ritter did. Colonel McGregor did. Almost everybody I know did. How did a 21-year-old get that kind of top secret security clearance? And he's literally a weekend warrior literally just doing this on weekends yeah yeah no this is that it raises a lot more questions because the timing of the leak as well this chat room was not out pushing it on the

internet they were not circulating it on other platforms in fact, the discoverers of it, the Bellingcat, that organization, direct ties to British intelligence. That's not a coincidence. In fact, the intelligence community probably could have shut this down, hushed it up, covered it up, and taken quiet action without making this a major news story, at least for a week or so. And this kid now is the scapegoat. I really hope he's got some decent legal counsel, because they ought to be in there standing in front of the judge demanding that this complaint filed by the Department of Justice be taken down, because it's a lie. It is false. You were the first person judging freedom went to when the news broke about this and your initial reaction, Larry, I think I'm quoting you

precisely. This was a controlled leak. Do you still believe that? And if you do, controlled by whom? I do believe it's controlled. And I think it's elements within not just the U.S. intelligence community, but people connected as well to the Brits. Here we go with the Brits again. But the fact that that's all with the U.S. intelligence organization, that's a group that has had longstanding ties with British intelligence and been a mouthpiece, a tool that they've used as part of their overall covert action operations. I hope that somehow the information that you've developed that we've just

discussed, that this is breaking news, Larry, I haven't seen it anywhere else. Gets to his lawyers. I'm hoping that his lawyers are security clearance qualified because they'll know the significance of this immediately. They should be before that judge this afternoon, as soon as your piece was published. I think you published it last night, which is when I saw it. And this information should be given to the judge immediately. And I would go after those prosecutors as aggressively as I could. I'd look them in the eye and say, these guys lied to you, judge. My client should be free this afternoon. They lied to you. They stood in this courtroom and told you this was a real assault weapon, whereas in reality, it's a glorified water pistol.

Yeah. You know, trying to paint him as a right-wing extremist terrorist in the making. Because that's the storyline, the narrative that they're pushing. And that is a lie. You know, this kid was someone who played games. He was still 21 years old, and he was playing drop-up games with airsoft rifles, and in the process, mishandled, grossly mishandled, allegedly, classified information. But I believe he was being used as a tool because the timing of that information and the nature of what was leaked, they could have, the intelligence community had the power to shut it down without that exposure,

and they chose not to. Do you think someone put it on his computer and he just thought that he had access to it? Someone who knew of his proclivity to share with his friends this type of information? I mean, how would a controlled leak work, Larry? Well, what happens is, so he was part of the unit, and I've since learned that everybody in that unit actually had these kinds of clearances or this kind of access. But that said, there was also the ability of people outside that organization that could actually monitor what the activity was monitor what they were doing and also in position to monitor what was being

printed what was being down or you know offloaded on from that computer so this was they were not just in total isolation up there and that's why I think somebody was aware of his activities, and he became a convenient tool for letting this information out without exposing the fact that there were other entering the intelligence community that were one of the messaging out that, hey, the war in Ukraine is not going, as we're being told by the likes of Austin and Milley. Well, we have you, Larry. I'd like to switch gears a few minutes for a minute. Yesterday

on Judging Freedom, we interviewed someone you and I know and respect, Scott Horton of antiwar.com. And I asked Scott, what is the goal of the neocons? What do they really hope to accomplish with this war, particularly in light of what we now learned from the documents that they blamed Tashara for revealing is their own view that Ukraine is losing. I want you to watch and listen to what I think is a pretty damn sharp summary of how the other side thinks. They clearly think that they're getting the better end of this, that they're bogging Russia down and bleeding them to bankruptcy. But of course, we're spending north of $100 billion on this effort ourselves. But they've said all along that what they want to do is just keep the war going as long as possible. And in fact, if you go back to the beginning of the war, everybody assumed, even the Ukrainian military assumed, the American spies and everyone else assumed that the Russians were going to roll right over their army and that we were going to be

backing an Afghan style insurgency all along. That was plan A. So plan B was, oh, great. The military is able to continue to stand and fend the Russians off for all this time. We'll continue to pour all the weapons we can into them to keep that going as long as possible. But then that raises the real question is if and when the Russians are able to essentially completely smash and route the Ukrainian military, it's still a land the size of Texas. And I don't think they want to take the Western half of it. But then if they don't, that leaves a rump Ukrainian state led by right wing nationalists allied with NATO and armed to the T that I presume that that is NATO's plan. That even if let's say the Ukrainian army falls apart tomorrow, they'll go back to plan A

and try to keep this thing going until Putin has to resign in disgrace. Pretty good summary, don't you think? Yes. He's correct at this. I call it the fantasy of the Afghan insurgency, because it's true that the United States had some success with promoting and arming insurgents in Afghanistan, the various Islamic factions, and weakening the Russian, the Soviet invasion in Afghanistan. But the people pushing that, they don't understand is, number one, the Ukrainian next to a Russian you can't tell the difference number one number two yes a little bit of a

language difference but more people will speak Russian than speak Ukrainian number three from a cultural standpoint the Russians are very well equipped to conduct counterinsurgency efforts they did it in Chechnya in their own country it was a bloody battle for about four years from 2004 to 2009. But they prevailed. They wiped out an Islamic insurgency in Chechnya. And remember, that's where the Sarnia brothers came from, the ones who did the Boston Marathon bombing. So Russia's had experience with that. And I think the neocons the because remember a lot of them come from a ukrainian heritage they come out of their their their parents or grandparents

are exiles from that they hate they just have a visceral hatred of russia and there's no reasoning with them there's no ability to explain that the r of today is the Russia of 30, 40 years ago when it was a communist Soviet state. Here's something that stuck in my brain as I listened to Scott and played this over and over again, what he said initially. How did American intel get it so wrong as to advise the president, unless again, this is another example of telling him just what they think he wants to hear, that Russia was going to march right through to Kiev and this would be over in two weeks? Yeah, I don't recall anybody, the people I was talking to at the time did not necessarily believe that that was going to happen there was act some puzzlement because they saw that Russia was sending in all this old equipment that none of their brand-new

equipment most modern tanks modern planes etc but that wasn't being employed so there was a lot of head scratching going on in the intelligence community early on in that in that period because they didn't really under they didn't listen to putin they did not listen to the russian generals because the the russians made it very clear what they were embarking on we're going to demilitarize and denazify Ukraine. We're not going to run a maneuver battle where we're taking big swaths of territory. We're not going to be running with a multi-million man army. We're going to a war of attrition

that we're going to end the military that Ukraine poses and really by also in the process take out NATO. And that's exactly what's happening. Larry, thank you so much for this. Thank you for the reporting on the air guns, and thanks for your analysis on the war itself. I've got to ask you one last question. In light of that analysis that you and I believe is accurate, in light of the failure to challenge the accuracy of the documents that

they say Teixeira released, what to make of, and I've been criticized for picking on her, but she deserves to be picked on. What to make of Victoria Nuland's nonsense that it's time, I can't even say it with a straight face, it's time for the Russians to, it's time for the Ukrainians to invade Crimea and for the United States to support the invasion. I mean, this is truly the most absurd statement made by anybody in the American government of which I'm aware in this entire war well we should probably help teach the Ukrainians some Japanese so they can do a proper Banzai suicide charge as they go into Crimea because they'll be wiped out you know this this

lack of care and concern for the human beings in Ukraine, these Ukrainians who are being sent to the slaughter because the United States is completely enabling this. You know, that is also, in my view, criminal. It's immoral. And Victoria Nuland bears a lot. She's got a lot of blood on her hands over this. Larry, always a pleasure. We look forward to chatting with you again next week. Thank you so much, my dear friend. Thank you, Judge. Have a great weekend. You as well. More as we get it.

Hot topics coming up in about five or ten minutes, and some of these are really hot. Did you know that a federal judge just enjoined the Department of Homeland Security from letting immigrants over the border and running free? Back when we have it. Judge Napolitano for judging freedom.