Judging Freedom - INTEL Roundtable : A Week in Russia - What Was Learned ?

Episode Date: September 11, 2026

INTEL Roundtable : A Week in Russia - What Was Learned ?See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Undeclared wars are commonplace. Pragically, our government engages in preemptive war, otherwise known as aggression with no complaints from the American people. Sadly, we have become accustomed to living with the illegitimate use of force by government. To develop a truly free society, the issue of initiating force must be understood and rejected. What if sometimes to love your country you had to alter or abolish the government? Jefferson was right? What if that government is best, which governs least? What if it is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong? What if it is better to perish

fighting for freedom than to live as a slave? What if freedom's greatest hour of danger is now? Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for judging freedom. Welcome to this special edition of the Intelligence Community Roundtable. It is the end of the It is the end of the week. We are, of course, joined by our regular colleague and contributor Larry Johnson, who today comes to us from St. Petersburg, Russia. Making a special return visit is our former regular, the great Ray McGovern. And joining us as well as the dear friend of all of ours, Colleen Rowley.

Colleen is probably the best-known ex-FBI agent in the country due to her. efforts to prevent 9-11. Colleen, it's a pleasure. Welcome here. Thank you for joining us. Larry, to you first, what is your takeaway from the three-hour dinner that you and our friends and I had this past week with Sergei Lavrov, the Foreign Minister of Russia? Well, for starters, he was very relaxed, good sense of humor. Maybe it was, I gave him, I gave him one of my Hawaiian shirts. He asked, he said, is this used? I said, no, no, it's fresh.

You know, it's new. Larry, I was with you. Nobody believes he's ever going to wear that. But your takeaway from the Q&A during dinner and his unbelievable candor. They don't trust Donald Trump. Leroff, I essentially reiterated that Donald Trump is agreement incapable. What was agreed to at Anchorage was never fulfilled and that Russia is looking for the Trump administration to do what it's promised to do. It's not doing what it's promised to do.

So the war is going to continue. It made it very clear that the terms that Vladimir Putin outlined back in June of 2024 to the foreign ministry in a speech that he gave that day, I think it was June 14th, that essentially the denatification, demilitarization of Ukraine must go forward. That means new elections. That means no NATO. And that means recognition of the territory that Russia now occupies, including the Donbos, both the Netsk, Luhansk, Herzan, and Zaporizia, as well as Crimea. That all of that is now part of Russia and will ever be so.

My recollection is identical to yours. you're better on the specifics than I am. Ray McGovern, no surprise or are you surprised that Foreign Minister Lavrov told Larry, John Mearsheimer, Alastair, Kruk, and me, in the presence of other Russian officials, but, you know, off the record, that they don't trust Donald Trump,

that they consider Whitkoff and Kushner to be real estate agents out to make business deals for themselves and not serious diplomats. Is any of that surprise you, Ray McGovern? Judge, the Russians coined a new Russian word. Ne the Gavora so possibly, which means not capable of doing an agreement. It's a new word.

And that's how they've been explaining how the U.S. has been behaving. What I think is new and worth noting is that publicly, Lavrov has said, look, the U.S., you want to help us? And he talked about this in talking about the readout of the latest phone call between Putin and, and what's the guy's name? Orange, here. Yeah, Trump.

Okay. He said, look, if you want to help us, stop assisting Ukraine. And I think that's the key to not only Whitkoff and Kush. but perhaps Ratcliffe's visit. I think Ratcliffe went and said, look, we're willing to stop assisting Ukraine so that he can't fire missiles and drones deep into Russia if you'd be willing to, and he was given the strong arm.

And so these guys come, and they have the same sort of request, and they're told, look, go tell Zelensky. If you want to help, go tell Zelensky, no more help with the intelligence. That will help. And now Lovraf has said that in public. So it's still pretty sticky, but I think we see now the terms under which the Russians would like to be able to say, okay, the U.S. is not assisting anymore.

Now we can deal. Now we can even talk to the likes of real estate agent and financial guy. Colleen, two and a half, three days after this dinner at which, Foreign Minister Lavrov was amazingly candid, as Larry has indicated, that they can't trust Trump. The Financial Times reported that Whitkoff and Kushner will soon be supplanted by CIA director Ratcliffe. Does that make sense to you? Will the Americans trust Ratcliffe any more or less than they would trust—excuse me. Will the Russians trust Ratcliffe any more or less than they would trust Whitkoff or

Kushner? Well, if I were the Russians, I would not trust Radcliffe anymore. Obviously, Trump has surrounded himself by loyalists, and that's who he employs. And they basically are restricted in what they can do. They are not to be trusted. It's not just the treaties and, of course, international law that basically the Trump administration has claimed they want to erase. They want to erase treaties. So how could you ever trust someone to engage in an agreement? But it's not just the international and the treaties. It's actually our own law, our own constitutional law. And, you know, even the Americans realize now that the laws really don't serve any purpose, you know, et cetera. So no, I think the Russians are just going to have to keep their guard up.

You know, you just put a question in my head. I've always wanted to ask you this, Carly. over years we've known each other. How do you explain the widespread russophobia in the American federal government, in law enforcement, in the deep state? Yeah, it's a good question. I think once something gets ingrained and if you go back, very few people are our age that remember the Cold War with the USSR. I mean, that's true.

Many of those people have died off. but it's been effectively resurrected. And so many people confuse the USSR with Russia. And even, you know, they did a great job. Propaganda works. And, you know, someone said this recently, but you can get people to believe anything. If you are, if you say it forcefully,

if you say it in authority, and if you can get that group think going. And, of course, our mainstream media, with some exceptions, but our mainstream media has been part and part parcel. It does go back to 9-11. I want to say this because it links in with 9-11 and the fact that afterwards, Cheney and Bush were able to get 70% of the American public to believe that Iraq, not Al-Qaeda, which was an enemy, et cetera, and actually our proxy force, we were using

al-Qaeda as a proxy force and still are. But it was a wrecked. that was behind 9-11. And they not only got 70% of the American public to believe that, but they continued to believe it for a couple of years. That's an amazing thing, and it shows the force of propaganda. And Ray McGovern, we know that the Patriot Act, monstrosity that it is, second only to the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, that the Patriot Act had been drafted before 9-11,

ready to be dropped in Congress, debate prohibited, and Republicans and Democrats were terrified and voted in favor of it. Yeah, we know that, and I'd just like to pick up on this business about Iraq being a threat to us and the Russians and so forth in 9-11. Peter Zelikau, who was appointed to be the head of the 9-11 commission, put it this way. And I quote, why would Iraq attack America? I tell you what I think the real threat is. It's the threat to Israel. And this is the threat they dare not speak its name. The American government doesn't want to lean too heavily on it rhetorically because it is not a

popular cell. Now, this is the fellow that a year later was named, executive director of 9-11 commission. Draw your own conclusions carefully, but the commission report, which I think Colleen and I have talked a lot about in public. One of the additions we had had holes in it, great big holes. You remember, Colleen, when great big holes were punched into it, that's because it's full of holes. And, you know, one indignity that I suffer is two of my former colleagues who rose up under

Bobby Gates and Bill Casey were members of the commission staff, senior members, and you can see what kind of stuff comes out of people like that. Larry, what is it about the Keeve regime, as you understand it, that it cannot bring itself to cut its losses and accept the inevitable outcome of this special military operation? The outcome is not only inevitable, It's obvious. What is it about them that they can't accept this? The war is great business, making a lot of money, and they're paying off lots of members of Congress.

The money is flown, goes through the Baltics, goes into Dubai, makes his way from Dubai to another little country in the Middle East, that then forwards that money into the bank accounts of members of Congress. the late Lindsey Graham was the recipient of that money. So, you know, this is the financial, as Lavrov told you and me, and this is one of the other things I asked him again to reiterate, because when we met with him two years ago now or a year ago, he said that Russia had agreed in Istanbul to the terms that Ukraine brought to the table, which was that the Donbos would have remained part of Ukraine.

It's just that the Russian speaker's rights would be protected, as with the rights of the Orthodox clergy. And Russia was willing to sign off on that then and there. But Joe Biden, Lloyd Austin, and Boris Johnson of the UK threatened Zelensky, and after that point, it was back to war. So there could have been peace. but the finances behind this. There are a lot of people in the West making money off of it,

and a lot of people in Ukraine making money off of it. Just to be clear, when you talk about money going to members of Congress, are you talking about to their political action committees, their political campaigns, or their personal bank accounts? What I was told, the offshore bank accounts that have been set up. In Lindsey Graham's case, it was $18 million. And I got that I got directly from from a close friend of mine who is involved with he presented the evidence to the Department of Defense Inspector General.

And what's interesting is our Department of War is not doing anything with it. People aren't being prosecuted. They're allowing this to go on. Ray, are the report, there are reports from Ha Arets. that the president of the UAE warned Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu a week before October 7th that an explosion was coming, that the inmates in the open-air concentration camp, although I doubt he used this phrase, would break out. And that Netanyahu did nothing because he wanted this to happen for his own domestic political advantage.

He, of course, has denied those reports. They since have been picked up by the major media throughout the world. What's your take on this? That is Aretz, a major newspaper in Israel. It's not the biggest one. It's not like the New York Times. It's more progressive than most. But it's true.

It's very true. And the upshot is that Netanyahu is in more trouble now. than it has ever been because this has a certain resonance in Israel. If you can imagine, the hostages, forget about the hostages. Netanyahu didn't give a rat's sputti about the hostages. He wanted this war, and he's gotten it. The big question is whether he still has the kind of hold on Trump that this war on Iran will get even worse.

Colleen, are there agents in the FBI? and officers in the CIA repulsed by American financing of Israeli genocide? Well, I think initially there were probably more, but there have been whistleblowers that have been prosecuted. They've tried to chill all dissent.

They went to hiring former military as a whole instead of diverse backgrounds. So I think it's probably less. They got the strocks out of the cave and strach climbing the ladder. And I don't think that you do have a lot of ones with integrity. And I've seen this in the Department of Justice as well. It's that loyalty. Loyalty has

been pressed to the max. I just wanted to piggyback on something Ray said about the warnings coming in ahead of time. And now we know that Netanyahu was warned. Guess what? on all fours with 9-11 and the fact that these warnings were coming in to the point where George Tenet was said to have his hair on fire, the system was blinking red, probably the two best lines in the 9-11 commission, the most honest lines, memos were coming in. They all had to deny afterwards that they had even read those memos. And so the same thing, you have officials hoping for a so-called New Pearl Harbor, don't care about the American casualties, just like the

liberty, you know, the fact that Americans have to die, it's an end justifies the means. So the means is terrible. Americans die, but it allows us to get our agenda, our global chess board, play where we can launch the war's, endless wars. And so very similar, very similar modus here between Israel. in the United States. 25 years and six months ago, you sought permission

from the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation to obtain a search warrant to search the computer of Zacharias Masawi, who turned out to be the 20th hijacker. Why was that permission denied you? Well, just a minor correction. I did agree with headquarters, that we should get a warrant at the time under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

By the way, it was an emergency request for this warrant because the agents, not myself, I wasn't the case agent, but the agents knew that he was going to, you know, they even identified the same violation that Musawi ended up prosecuted and convicted of, which is interference in aviation. They had this, our acting supervisor. What did Bob Mueller, who was then the director of the FBI, do or deny you? Mueller wasn't exactly the director. It was an interim time.

He was only the director for one week before 9-11. I doubt he knew, for instance, that the CIA knew that the two of the hijackers were in, and were in California. I doubt that Mueller knew what George Tenet knew. George Tenet was briefed in late August. Fundamentalist learns to fly. Tenet knew all of this. Muller was brand new. And I was calling him up afterwards because he kept saying stupid things like, oh, we didn't know any of this, whatever.

Well, it was just precisely the opposite. But he did turn into the good soldier afterwards going along with everything that Bush and Cheney told him to do. But, you know, he, in all fairness to Mueller, he was only one week the director, beforehand, and that's pretty quick time to learn everything. Let me interrupt here, if I may. Sure. Colleen, you were stymied by lawyers at high levels, some of whom wouldn't admit that they had read all your emergency memos.

And one lawyer I have in mind, and I challenged him publicly, he got a big step increase or a wonderful merit increase. Tell us about that. Those were the guys that did it. Yeah, and that's the careerism that is part and parcel of why these horrible tragedies occur. Because everybody puts their head down, goes along to get along. Our headquarters was afraid of rocking the boat. Well, it's complicated, but one of the proxy forces that the U.S. had operated in the Chechen War

was aligned with and entwined with bin Laden. We had a memo that said that. And then afterwards they denied they had read this memo. Why? It's our proxy force. It's like saying Whitey Bulger is an FBI informant, and you're going to go out and say, oh, he's committing murders. Of course, that's the problem here.

And nobody wants to tell the hard truth. Mueller was not about to get into the hard truth, even once he did know some of these things. Larry, did George Tenet have reason to believe that 9-11 was going to happen before it happened? Well, what we have is, I think, pretty, let's call it circumstantial evidence that within the CIA, the right hand, and the left hand didn't know what they were doing. Within the CIA, on the one hand, you did have Kofar Black insisting that something terrible was going to happen, and he was demanding that you're asking for help from foreign governments. On the other hand, and this is now beyond dispute, the United States through the CIA, was funding the very Islamic radicals, including al-Qaeda, ISIS,

that we funded them both to fight the Russians. The second Chechen war was well underway, that these Islamic extremists that were being funded, trained, equipped by the CIA, were carrying out terrorist attacks in Russia. And at the same time, we were also using those same extremists to attack Iran. And I mean, that's been going on now for 30 years.

This predated the attack. attacks on 9-11. And even after the attacks of 9-11, when we were supposedly fighting a war on Islamic terrorism, the statistics show beyond any doubt that it was Sunni-backed terrorists. The individuals funded by the Saudis, by the Emirates, by the Kuwaitis, by the Qataris, none, and I repeat that, none funded by Iran, not one dime. Ray McGovern, wouldn't the Mossad have known the 9-11 was going to happen before it happened? There's evidence that they did. They were dancing Israelis out in New Jersey, celebrating as the towers fell down.

And I would just add to what Larry said with which I agree, but more particularly, we know that there were two Al-Qaeda operators on the West Coast that were being funded by the Saudi intelligence people and the CIA operators were forbidden to share that with the FBI until one week before the event. So Tenet, in my view, new chapter and verse, he was proceeding politically whether he knew exactly what was going to happen. He should have because NSA did, and we can ask Tom Drake about that. So there was enough evidence to do it, and they let Tenet off the hook because he had made enough warnings that he could come back and say, well, on this state, I showed the Senate committee this and that. So, yeah, they were all involved.

I think tenant knew about it. Colleen, last question is today's FBI in 2026 as corrupt? I don't mean corrupt in the sense of accepting money from people, but corrupt in the sense of doing the wrong thing for the wrong reason, as it was when you were there. You know, I want to add to the tenant knowledge on the morning of 9-11. He's having breakfast with his mentor in Oklahoma. I think in Oklahoma,

Boran or someone like that, Senator Boran, and someone comes up and says a plane has flown into the World Trade Center and the first thing out of George Tenet's mouth is, I wonder if it's the guy in Minnesota. First thing out of his mouth. Well, the guy in Minnesota is the one that you

wanted to investigate. That's right. So he knew everything. Tenet knew a lot. You're right. Maybe not the precise details, but he knew a lot. And, you know, the problem is nothing was really fixed after 9-11. The so-called failure to connect the dots, which is a lack of intelligence sharing. That's what it means.

The CIA doesn't tell the FBI that two of the terrorists were in California, that they had been tracking for two years. I mean, there's like dozens of these failures to share intelligence and say that you've even read it. Guess what? I don't see any fix on that. To this day, when a new, like the underwear bomber and these other terrorist attacks would occur, they would go back to these officials and they would, what would be their answer? I didn't see that. I didn't read that memo. That's, I mean, after 25 years, we still don't even have a system to ensure that people read their memos. I mean, I've never seen a fix on that. Incredible. And that's, guess what? If they would read their memos, maybe we wouldn't have had to kill nearly five million people in error that weren't even the correct al-Qaeda, etc. If people would just read their intelligence and then have the integrity to act on the intelligence. And that's never been fixed. In fact, it's gone the opposite way. Ray, now I see why Colleen won that Sam Adams Award. Yeah, she was the first. And, you know, one of the things she told Bob Mueller was, look, you know, this new policy of preemptive violence. That's not what DOJ follows.

I mean, we have strict standards before we can use violence. And if you use that now abroad, it's going to come back and haunt us. She said that. And, gosh, I guess you know what you were talking about, Colleen. Congratulations for warning. Guys, thank you very much. Go ahead, Colleen. I'll give you the last word, my dear friend.

And I had to wake up a year ago or so and have a guy say, Daddy went to war last night, who went up to the doorsteps of our state senators and representatives and shoot them in cold blood. And why? What was the motive? There's no motive anymore. It's senseless violence, basically,

and mimicking what they see, the leaders in Washington, DC do senseless violence makes no sense at all right right Larry it's probably tomorrow where you are thank you very much for your time Ray what a pleasure to see you again and I'll see you next week in Chicago Colleen I forgot how good you are I hope you'll come back and join us again thank you everybody have a great weekend coming up this we are speaking of the weekend my interview with Sergei Lavrov is an hour long we've cut it in half. So the first part of the interview

is Saturday at 1 o'clock. Lavrov Part 2, Sunday at 1 o'clock. Monday morning, all of your favorites, including Larry and Alistair Crook. Thank you for watching. Judge Napolitano for judging Freedom.