Judging Freedom - INTEL-Roundtable w/McGovern & Johnson | Should the CIA be Dismantled?

Episode Date: January 1, 2024

INTEL-Roundtable w/McGovern & Johnson | Should the CIA be Dismantled?See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Resolve to earn your degree in the new year in the Bay with WGU. With courses available online 24-7 and monthly start dates, WGU offers maximum flexibility so you can focus on your future. Learn more at wgu.edu. Hi everyone, Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Friday, December 29th, 2023, New Year's Eve around the corner. Ray McGovern and Larry Johnson join us for our weekly intelligence community roundtable. Ray and Larry, I want to start by thanking you for all the work you have put into this show during the past year.

It has enhanced our previously existing friendships. It has enhanced my admiration for the, and respect for the two of you for your careers in the intelligence community and your courage in willing to expose unpleasant truths that I know a lot of your former colleagues would prefer you didn't expose. But from my heart to yours, thank you very much for all of this. Thanks, Josh. Thank you. Larry, let me start with you. Before we get into the subject matter, which is should the CIA be dismantled? And if so, how? And if so, what, if anything, should replace it? I want to lead up to that in both Ukraine

and Gaza. So, Larry, what is the latest in Ukraine? United States is desperately trying to flip the narrative. They're trying to come up with a storyline that will allow Biden to explain why we're getting out. So the storyline is that, you know, Putin secretly wants to, he's in real trouble. I mean, the Russians are being slaughtered right and left by the Ukrainians. The economy's in terrible shape. Inflation spiraling out of control. They've got heartbreak of psoriasis, infestation of ants, and therefore he's going to secretly look to negotiate with the United States

because, as he knows, the United States is such a trustworthy negotiating partner. That's the story that's been put out twice by the New York Times and then also by Politico. And it keeps, so these three articles came out within three days. Well, they're not listening to Putin. They're not listening to Sergei Lavrov, the foreign minister. They're not listening to former President Medvedev. All three have just basically said, we're not negotiating.

The United States is not to be trusted. You know, the only negotiation that's going to take place is Ukraine will have an unconditional surrender. That's it. Russia's not giving back any territory. They're not backing down. Do you think that the statements made by our friend Jack Devine to the Sun in Australia and repeated by him on News Nation last night are part of this scam? Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. Jack, you know, Jack's just going along with the party. Because what he's saying is so detached from reality that um you know we we know some objective facts we know that the united states cannot produce enough artillery shells

to keep the ukrainians supplied we know that the united states is going to japan begging for them to make some patriot missiles because we can't make enough to give to the Ukrainians. We know that the Russians are launching massive missile strikes that the Ukrainians are incapable of shooting down. And then most of the missiles they fire miss and then hit their own citizens, killing their own citizens. So yes, Jack Devine's playing along with this. Let's flip the narrative.

We've got to somehow convince the Republicans that Ukraine has a snowball's chance in hell, and therefore, we can get some more money to keep this body floating before it sinks. Ray, is the CIA capable of producing these mass lies and deceptions? Or would somebody like you and Larry, who I'm not sure that there is anyone still working as an analyst in the CIA who hasn't already quit because his or her analysis has been doctored or isn't ready to acquiesce in what the party line is. What we have is a war here. And who's in charge of a war? The military. And who's in charge of the military? Defense Secretary Austin.

And what's his record with intelligence? Well, we know when he was head of CENTCOM, with purview over the Middle East, he lied through his teeth several times. The analysts filed a formal complaint with the Department of Defense, and 50 of them signed that thing and said, he's falsifying evidence. We're telling them the real story. He's gilding the lily, and he's telling his uppers in the White House that everything's going to be fine in Syria. Well, what happened to them? Well, they did an investigation. How did

the investigation go? Well, there was a one star that was investigating a four star. How does that turn out? As you would expect. So now Austin is the defense secretary, for God's sake. So, you know, intelligence from the CIA, analysts at the bottom, even if they tried to tell the truth, they would not be able to get the ear of anyone, including, well, they would get their director's ear, I suppose. But whether Bill Burns would have the tem Biden administration to come up with this scam? In other words, to make them realize that Ukraine is going to lose, but hasn't lost already, and they have to do everything they can to make sure the blame is not on old Joe. Russia has launched a very large counteroffensive.

It's across the entire front, from north to south. And unlike Ukrainians, the Russians don't go out and announce, okay, yeah, we're going to have a counteroffensive to counter their offensive. They're good poker players. They keep their mouths shut. They hold their cards very close to their chest. But they've recaptured, they've captured Marinka, a city just outside of the capital Donetsk, that had been used as a base by the Ukrainians to shell the people of Donetsk for the last nine,

10 years. So the Russians finally captured that. They're pushing through and beyond Avdivka. They're down. So when you draw the map, they're moving and enveloping a whole number of Ukrainian soldiers. So when that news is coming out, then they create this distraction like we talked about the other day uh the blowing up the the ship that was in for dry dock repairs that's an amphibious landing ship and last time i checked that this war is not being fought on the ocean or in the black sea it's being fought on land so you know you can you can blow up one ship that's not used to carry anything right now, and that doesn't change the war, but it distracts. It just gets Western attention focused on these supposed victories of Ukraine

when, in fact, Ukraine's losing and in the midst of it, you've got Zelensky finger-pointing at each other and saying, no, he's the one that wants 500,000. No, he's the one. So it's just getting worse by the week. Military coup is on the horizon.

Ray, when we, when the three of us began covering the war in Ukraine, 22 months ago, my God, it seems like yesterday, but 22 months ago, you and Larry were pretty steadfast in your view that CIA on the ground gathering raw data were truthfully, accurately, courageously gathering data, reporting it to the superiors. By the time it made its way to Washington, there was so much spin in there. It was what the president wanted to Washington. There was so much spin in there. It was what the president wanted to hear. Do you think that is still the case or is the president now getting true and accurate reports from a developed or generated initially by agents in the field? I would say that it doesn't matter, Judge. The die has been cast.

Biden seems to be still in control of things. For some reason or other, Blinken and Sullivan are carrying out his orders, not with only respect to Ukraine, but with respect to Gaza. What the people on the ground are saying matters very little. What worries me, And I just came off another show where a very perspicacious analyst said, you know, NATO is going to have to put troops on the ground in Ukraine. And I said, what? And he said, and then I got to thinking, wasn't it President Biden about 10 days ago that said, oh, we're going to have American troops fighting Russian troops?

Yes. What was the premise for that? If Russia attacks NATO. So I got to thinking, whoa, is a false flag attack being planned? There's all kinds of ways to do this. Some false flag attack against Poland or the Baltic states or something. Are they crazy enough to do that to avoid a complete washout on Ukraine? I wish I could rule that out, but I can't.

Larry, before we get into the question of the day, which is should the CIA be dismantled, is the government foolish, reckless, criminal, and immoral enough to concoct a false flag, to have somebody or something attack Poland and claim it was the Russians? Yeah, we've already seen they've blown up Nord Stream for starters. So it's something that they very well could do. The thing that alarms me is when you read all these different pieces and you listen to people like Jack Devine, I don't think Jack Devine's being dishonest. I think he genuinely believes that Russia is weak, Russia is incompetent, Russia is backwards, Russia is authoritarian. He's obsessed with something that existed 35 years ago. It doesn't exist today.

Russia is very capable, very competent, and frankly, more technologically advanced than we are in military technology. And so if you go out and underestimate your opponent and you think, oh, I can beat them, and then you don't do the proper verifications to find out, well, actually, that's a mixed martial artist that's won 10 championships. Then you go out and start a fight. You're going to get your ass beat. And that's, frankly, I think what's going to happen to the United States. We're going to pick a fight. Russia's going to retaliate. And we're going to be left there

unable to do anything. And it's going to be a wake-up call for the Lindsey Grahams and for the Jack Devines and for everybody that's indulged all of this nonsense about Russia being a weakling and incompetent. We're going to take a break for a commercial for Lear Capital. When we come back, we will address the issue of what, if anything, should be done to the CIA. Can Donald Trump, if he's elected president again, dismantle it? Can it be dismantled? If it is dismantled, what, if anything, should replace it? But right after the Lear commercial, we're going to run.

I'm smiling because this will raise the blood pressure of both Ray and Larry. A clip of Lindsey Graham's latest. I won't even tell you what it is, but you can only imagine. So Lear, and then we'll be back right after this. Justin Faltano here. I love being a spokesperson for causes that I believe in, and one of them is the soundness of money. We don't have that anymore.

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All right, guys. So before we get into the subject of the day, I just have to run this Lindsey Graham clip of an interview that he gave at my former place of employment, Fox News. Watch this. Secretary Austin and the Biden administration's failing our troops in the field. I admire him. He's a patriot, but he's not doing a good job protecting the soldiers. I asked him a couple of months ago, Joey, what you were talking about. Is there a red line?

Would you tell our enemies publicly that if you kill an American, we're coming after you? Without Iran, there are no Houthis. The Houthis are completely backed by Iran. I've been saying for six months now, hit Iran. They have oil fields out in the open. They have the Revolutionary Guard headquarters you can see from space. Blow it in the open. They have the Revolutionary Guard headquarters you can see from space.

Blow it off the map. Start World War III, Senator. Does this represent the attitude that Jack Devine manifests in the CIA today, Ray McGovern? Judge, I would remind our audience that there are two CIAs set up by Truman. The first one was to give him untainted intelligence, not subservient to the State Department or the Pentagon. And the second one was written into the National Security Act of 1947, and it said the CIA shall perform such other functions and duties related to intelligence as the president shall from time to time direct. That's the covert action part of the agency. They're the ones that have all the money. There's the ones that Jack Devine worked for and is still, I believe, working for. They

carry out policy. They don't inform policy. So if the president says, look, I want to make the Russians look really bad, he tells the covert action people to do that, and they do it. The analysts, they get subsumed, nonetheless. The policy is to make the Russians look really bad. As Larry said, they're not really bad, but that's how it comes out. So it's a hybrid. It's kind of like a self-contradiction here to have people trying to come up with the right information to form policy, and then you have this other with all the money and all the people blowing up things like pipelines. One additional he thinks there. If you go back to the Cuban crisis, okay?

The Bay of Pigs. Guess what? Arthur Schlesinger wrote a memoir after that. And he said, look, the covert action people never told the intelligence people what was going to happen. So the intelligence people were not able to say Castro will not be overthrown by this. This would be a mockery, okay? Now, guess what? 62, President Kennedy had the presence of mind to consult the intelligence people,

and we avoided from all being obliterated. Ray Klein, who I worked for, who was deputy director for intelligence, told Kennedy, look, we don't know for sure that those missiles in Cuba are armed with nuclear warheads, but they make no sense without it. You have to assume that they are. And indeed, many were, we learned 30 years later. So, you know, there's a good example. In 61, we let the COVID action people run things. That was the Bay of Pigs. 62, just one year later, Kennedy has the presence of mind to say, look, you know, let's listen to these people who know something about the technical aspects and the political aspects. And we avoided what could have been a nuclear war. Brilliant, brilliant and gifted analysis, Ray. Thank you. Larry, should the second part of the CIA, the covert part, the part Jack worked for,

the part that has overthrown governments and assassinated people and fought wars, should that exist? Not in an intelligence organization. If you're going to use it put it in DOD but it really I think it's been counterproductive for us

as a function what it has achieved over the last 60 years has just created more chaos more death, more destruction it's not made America more secure it's not enriched us it's not made us wealthier so it really it's one of those things that looks on paper looks like it's nice to have but when you get right down to it uh it doesn't what it does achieve or accomplish

ends up being very negative for the overall welfare of the country i mean isn't it like a loaded gun in the president's desk a secret private army that he can use to attack anybody, kill anybody, steal anything that he wants? Yeah, well, it's very subservient, very sensitive to what the politicians want. And when you give politicians that kind of option, a lot of times they use it. And that's, you know, started back with Eisenhower going after Mosaddegh in Iran in 1954, was it?

So, you know, we've been involved with this overthrowing and interfering and meddling in other countries now for over 70 years. And the irony is we get so upset and exercised at just the possibility that the Russians are interfering with our election. How dare they? And yet we're the biggest meddlers in the world. And we've caused more mayhem and chaos than any other country around the world. And we refuse to look in the mirror and see ourselves for what we are. Ray, can any president, even someone with a will, a stone in front of Trump, dismantle and put out of business the second part of the CIA, the covert part? Not unless he was really, really smart, really politically astute, and knew where the bodies were. Now, in January, I think it was January 2nd, 2017, before Trump even took office, Chuck Schumer got himself invited onto Rachel Maddow's show. And he said, Rachel, I have something to tell you.

He said, you know, taking on the intelligence community, the new president-elect is treading on very dangerous ground because they have six ways to Sunday to get back at you if they want to. And she said, oh, is that right, Chuck? Well, there was the warning to the new President Trump. He was not wise to the ways of Washington. He thought he could run Washington like a real estate company or something, and he couldn't. And they did him in.

They did him in right quick, even though he was elected. So there's the example. The other thing I'd like to say is that Larry put his figure on it. Yamosa Dec, the freely elected Persian prime minister for the first time in three millennia. Right. What happens? He decides, oh, we've got all this rich oil.

Maybe we should have, maybe the Iranian people should have more share of this oil, okay? So what happens? He decides to take care, take nationalize these oil things. And what happens? The British take us. We're fledgling. 1953, we're a fledgling organization.

Our daddy, the British, take us. Now, this is what you do when some upstart in the third world tries to take our oil and we overthrew them. That's why they hate us. That's why Lindy Graham wants to get back at Iran because they're such a threat to us. They are no threat to us. They are a threat to Israel. And if Lindsey Graham has his way, that's the end of Israel as well as parts of Iran. Larry, would a president who dismantled the covert part of the CIA, the personal secret private army,

do so at the peril of his own life? Yeah. I mean, the entrenched bureaucracy is so great, and there's so many interests tied to it. I think it's almost impossible to do. The only way that it would happen, we would be involved with the war, we would be devastated, we would suffer physical devastation here at home. And then at that point, sort of rebuilding out of the ashes, that would be our only opportunity to restructure

the intelligence community. Because what's very likely to happen is, you know, whoever is president is going to get blindsided with a threat, and then it's one that will cause significant destruction here inside America. And then they'll be looking for, you know, who to blame. The scapegoat must be found. And so at that point, point yeah you could probably eliminate that part of the cia but you know we're also talking broader reform you got to get rid of the dni the director of national intelligence all that is is one more layer of bureaucracy upon what's already

an enormous uh group of intelligence bureaucracies uh we just we have so much intelligence that we're so that we're really very stupid. We don't know anything. It's funny that they call it intelligence. Ray, you remember the op-ed in the Washington Post written by former President Truman in the days when the Washington Post

had two editions and suddenly that op-ed didn't appear in the second edition because the Washington Post's masters in Langley wanted to quash it. What did Truman say in that op-ed? What did he regret? What did Eisenhower do in the Mosaddegh or whatever other overthrows there were that caused Truman to regret what he did in 1947 when he signed the National Security Act into law. Judge, what he said was, this is not what I set the CIA up to do. I didn't want it set up to mislead presidents into war, read Bay of Pigs. And I certainly didn't want them to be doing cloak and dagger stuff all over the place without much control.

Now, we know the background of the op-ed because Admiral Souders, who was his chief of intelligence, and he exchanged correspondence as Truman was drafting this. And it appeared, not incidentally, on the first, on 23 December, one month after the assassination. It did not appear in any other editions. It was pulled. It didn't appear in any of the media except the Missouri Independent, Truman's newspaper. And it was it was just dissed off the public memory. This was an indictment of what happened by the president who knew what he had created. And you're right. He said, I didn't I didn't mean to create this kind of monster.

And we know that he carefully prepared this kind of thing. Now, what happened after that? Alan Dulles goes out to see Harry Truman on a pretext. He's making a speech in Kansas City, right? And he says, you didn't really mean that, did you? And Truman says, of course I did. Alan Dulles dictates a memorandum for the record to the general counsel, Larry Houston of the CIA. And he says, Truman has recanted this. He said, I didn't really want to say that. Puts that memo in that record.

Next month, Life magazine asked Truman, did you mean that? Of course I meant it. So what's the reason for the memo for the record? Just in case someone looks into what Truman had said, let's say he dies. Well, he told me Alan Dulles in, you know, it's right in the record there. Larry Houston was the general counsel for the first 30 years of the CIA. So it's all very ingrown. It's all very corrupt. And Truman, to his credit, said, you know, this is beyond the pale. Assassinated president? I don't think that should happen. And he let it go, and nobody took note. Wow.

Gentlemen, thank you very much. It's a difficult subject to discuss, one that I know our fans have been looking forward to hearing, and I can tell from watching, from the number watching, and from the comments, much appreciated. A belated Merry Christmas. I've already wished you that. An early Happy New Year.

We'll be back to our old routine. We're not on on Monday. We'll have you on next week individually and then collectively in this roundtable. But from my heart to yours, from our team to your family, Happy New Year. Same to you, Judge. Thank you, guys. So coming up, I have a busy afternoon. If you want to follow me at 5.03 p.m., I'm on WABC radio in New York on whether or not the First Amendment protects the pro-Hamas rallies in New York City.

Of course it does. At 5.15, I'm on Newsmax. And at 5.30, right here on Judging Freedom, Max Blumenthal with some of the most explosive reporting that I have seen on the horrors perpetrated by the IDF and the Netanyahu government. You don't want to miss it. Judge Napolitano for judging freedom. Thank you.