Judging Freedom - Kremlin Attacked- What do we know, What does it mean_ Larry Johnson fmr CIA

Episode Date: May 3, 2023

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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, Judge Andrew Napolitano here with Judging Freedom. Today is Wednesday, May 3rd, 2023. It's about 2.30 in the afternoon here on the East Coast of the United States. Larry Johnson joins us again.

Larry, thank you very much for your time. Since last we spoke, the news media is focusing on a drone strike or what appears to have been a drone strike on a building in the Kremlin. Some are saying this was an attempt to assassinate President Putin. Others were saying, well, everybody knows that though he has a grand magnificent apartment there, he doesn't really live there. Right. In in either case, it appears as though this was not successful. But before we look at it, we have a couple of different views of it from Western media and from Russian media. What are your initial thoughts on these reports now confirmed and these allegations? It's been 82 years since the Russians faced, let's call it an armed aircraft overhead

trying to bomb something in Moscow. And it is that significant. Yes, no loss of life. And it was not a large explosive device on board that drone. And the odds that it could have killed Putin, I think, are very, very, very remote. But the symbolism of it and the effect, the electric effect upon the body politic in Russia cannot be and should not be underestimated. Because as I said, the last one to pull something like this were the Nazis. And they did it as they came up to the outskirts of Moscow in December of 1941. And the

Soviet then were able to stop them. So this entire conflict with Ukraine has been portrayed as a fight against neo-Nazis. The Ukrainians, I think, made a grievous error in launching this attack because it is not going to cause splits within Russia. It's going to galvanize the people. I've never seen such outrage being voiced across the board by different politicians. It's almost equal to the kind of reaction we had here in the United States in the aftermath of the 9 11 attacks the political partisan differences temporarily fell away it was I could seen as this could complete attack upon our soul upon our nation and that's why would Ukraine, if it was the military,

do something like this, knowing that the likely response could be catastrophic to the military and to Kiev itself? I think they're hoping that the Russians will retaliate in a way that will increase the odds that the United States and NATO insert themselves into this war. You know, it's doing something like having the United States put the 82nd Airborne in Odessa, landing U.S. troops in what's now currently Ukrainian territory, hoping that it will elicit something like that. Would the Ukraine military or intelligence, whoever sent these drones, there appear to have been two of them. We'll look at them from a couple of different angles in a moment.

Have run this past the U.S. Defense Department first? No, I don't think so. I can't, while we've raised some questions about the level of Secretary Austin's intelligence, he's not that stupid. You mean his intellect or the intelligence materials available to him? The combination of the two. I mean, this is, the U.S. officials recognize that this is crossing, as one of the Russian politicians said, this isn't crossing a red line. This is a stoplight. And so it's not just Medvedev that's popping off. It is, you know, dozens of political officials in Moscow.

Putin hasn't said a word. So the Russian, I think think Putin and the military still, they're going to remain cool and collected. They're not going to do an emotional response. They're not just going to lash out, but it is going to ramp up the response because the politics of it now in Russia require it. You cannot attack Moscow on the eve of the celebration of the defeat of the Nazis 82 years ago, and then expect this to go unanswered. Right. This would be like attacking the U.S. Capitol on July 4th or July 3rd, right before July 4th parade. All right, let's look at this. Gary, you can start running these clips.

This one we're going to see several times. There it is. Now, what do you think caused it to explode, Larry? It looks to me like it was intercepted by something. You know, the Russians did six months ago, as I recall, they put air defense systems on the roofs of some of the buildings in Moscow. So they will have had those systems in place.

All right, here's another view from the other side. And we just see it explode. If you look carefully on the very left, you see that dome that we saw in the previous one. Now it's going to close up. It's going to zoom in there's the there's the dome now it looks like there's a little bit of a fire on the

roof of the dome uh gary can you run the first one again please which shows the front of the dome there we go so there appears to be some sort of a fire in the rear. Is that the debris from the drone or did the drone attack the built the domed building? Yeah, it looks, it looks to me like that's debris, uh, even a fuel that may have been on board a limited amount, but, uh, it did not impact the dome and explode as a result of that. Where would this have been sent from? I mean, Moscow is, you know, technically in Europe, but it's nowhere near the Russian border. Well, it's about, I think the distance from Ukraine, from the Ukrainian border over to Moscow is about 300 miles, 350 miles. So it is feasible, conceivable that a drone could fly that far.

What's going to be interesting is recovering the parts of the drone. Whose drone was it? Who made it? Was it the Turkish Baywacker? Was it made by the United States? Was it made by Poland? Was it made by Ukraine? likelihood of this conflict expanding because it is now that country that made that drone is going to share a responsibility for launching this attack. Is there any chance that this is a false flag intended by Russian nationalists to pull President Putin to the right and to cause him to lose his restraint and unleash the military to destroy Kyiv?

You have to consider that as one possibility. But I think the desperation at this part, on the part of Ukraine, is so deep that they're willing to take some crazy risks in order to try to get this war expanded in a way where they've got NATO actually engaged on their side, because they can't do it themselves. They now realize that. Are they still preparing for a spring offensive, or, and you and Colonel McGregor and Colonel Schaefer have both expressed from time to time respect for the intellect, experience, and intellectual honesty, not of President Zelensky, but of his chief military people. Are his chief military people astute enough to say, Mr. President, we'll do what you

tell us to, but this offense, if you want, it'll be suicide? I would hope that they would say that. What we are seeing is a significant uptick right now in attacks all along, and let's call them terrorist attacks. They're the kind of thing that the OSS would have carried out in World War II, blowing up railroad lines. There have been two trains derailed within the last week and a half. Artillery strikes are still continuing against civilian areas, not just in the Donbass, but also inside Russia, Bryansk and Kursk. So clearly Ukraine right now is stepping up its activity. But these attacks are pinpricks. They're not changing anything strategically or tactically on the ground other than making the Russians angry. That's what it's accomplishing.

Our mutual friend Tom Lipscomb, a journalist who follows this stuff very assiduously and writes in a gifted way, reports that Russians have been running methodical textbook attacks destroying the assembly area, that's the assembly area for the so-called spring offensive, for 13 brigades. So what does that mean, 13 brigades that the Russians, Ukrainian brigades, that the Russians are methodically destroying? So it means it could be anywhere between 60,000 and 24,000 troops. So a brigade can run from 2,000 to 5,000 men, depending. But they're not all going to be assembled in one area. There are different assembly points around the country.

At this juncture, we, the public, the folks on the internet, we're not sure where the next blow will come, what Ukraine, where they will launch their attack. I am pretty confident that the Russians know where it will take place. They're preparing for a lot of contingencies. And you know, one thing people continue to forget about, the Russians have a significant force in Belarus up north. That's been completely quiet. Nobody's paid any attention to that. But that is just another reserve that the Russians could unleash if they decided in the midst of a Ukrainian offensive that they would force the Ukrainians to have to stop and figure out what to do. Because a force launched from Belarus very well could take Kiev pretty quick. offensive that they would force the Ukrainians to have to stop and figure out what to do because a

force launched from Belarus very well could take Kiev pretty quick in Tom lipscombe's article he quotes the uh former FBI agent Mark Wauk uh as saying Ukraine's professional military knows that the offensive the so-called spring offensive, would be suicidal. Ukrainian losses of manpower continue to be extremely heavy. Russia is claiming Ukraine lost 15,000 men in the month of April. Is that credible? Do Tom and Mark Wauk have this correct? Yeah, no, I think it's very credible. In fact, I think that also accounts for why you've seen a complete about-face on the part of the Polish general, sort of the equivalent of Mark Milley in Poland. He came out the other day and he said, really, there's no way Ukraine can win this. They would need at least, in his words, not mine, a two million man army, because they would need

that kind of manpower advantage in order to have hopes of prevailing over Russia, not to mention the need for armor, tanks, artillery, fixed wing aircraft, which are non-existent or exist only in very limited supplies. So even the, and this general was one of the biggest enthusiastic supporters of Ukraine up until about a month and a half ago with terms of his public rhetoric. So I think people like him are seeing this and those facts about the losses in April. The General Zeluzhny tried to warn Zelensky. All right, Zeluzhny is the commander in chiefhny tried to warn Zelensky Zeluzhny is the commander-in-chief, the military commander

of all Ukraine troops. Go ahead. He tried to warn Zelensky that we need to pull our manpower out and Zelensky for whatever reason felt, for political reasons, wanted to keep throwing manpower in there and they were getting chewed up.

It was you cannot fire one artillery round as the Ukrainians were doing and then get six or seven back in return and not suffer greater casualties than the Russians. And that's exactly what was going on. Do you think that President Zelensky fears for his life if he were to show an interest in either a strategic withdrawal or a ceasefire and negotiations at a neutral site? He may be in fear of his life if he doesn't pursue something like that. But the problem they have is I do not see russia of the mindset now to sit down to negotiate to say okay yeah let's work things out we can you take this and we'll take that and you know we'll call it quits i think russia this this war has been a revelation to russia about the the

deep-seated hatred in the west of all things Russian. Not just Russian actions, but the Russian people, their language, recognize that the Ukrainian law is trying to eradicate any use of Russian. Who does that? It's inconceivable, but that's what they're pursuing. So I think faced with that, Russia recognizes they've got to eliminate the nazi foundation that is at the heart of ukraine's government yesterday uh the pope pope francis made a reference to secret negotiations in which the vatican was

participating and today the Vatican Secretariat of State reinforced what the Pope said. There were no more specifics than that. I mean, how likely is it that there are secret negotiations? Both of these are Christian countries. Zelensky is Jewish. Putin is Russian Orthodox. So you have Roman Catholic, Russian Orthodox, Eastern Orthodox, Greek Orthodox, you have all these variants of Christianity in the two countries. Not all of them recognize the Pope. What is the likelihood that the Vatican is actually involved in something meaningful? I think it's very low, in part because of the long-standing enmity that exists between the Orthodox world and the Roman Catholics. I mean, this goes back centuries.

And in light of the recent attacks upon the Russian Orthodox Church in Ukraine, where the vile attacks, almost satanic, if you will, and attacking bishops and priests and shutting down monasteries, robbing them, putting their own priests under house arrest. And the Vatican's been largely quiet about that. It has not been speaking with any kind of outrage at what's taking place. So I don't think the Vatican is going to carry a lot of credibility, at least with the Russians. Let me switch gears a little bit to something we

discussed at length a few weeks ago. I don't know. Time flies. Maybe it's a few months ago. I don't remember when. The Nord Stream Pipeline destruction. Does the West now pretty much concede that Cy Hersh was right, that it was the U.S. Navy and the CIA? Yeah, they've given up trying to sell that the, you know, the SS Minnow was out there with Gilligan and the Skipper blowing it up. You know, that's gone by the board. You know, what was so telling is there is no urgency on the part of anybody in the West to actually conduct an open investigation to demonstrate who carried it out, because they know if they did that, they wouldn't like the answer they're going to get, that it will clearly implicate the United States. Can I add to what is mind-boggling? And that is the silence of German leaders, both industrial leaders whose shareholders suffered because of the destruction of the pipeline, and political leaders. Not a peep out of them. President Putin says, well, what do you expect? The United States still occupies

Germany like it did right after World War II. A bit hyperbolic, but you get his point. Right. Well, and remember, the Green Party is the controlling government entity in Germany right now, and they're all, they're happy as can be that there's no more natural gas coming in. They just assume people be sitting, sunning themselves, getting solar power and wind power. And that's how you create a country that would be modern in theory. And in the process, they are creating it's a swell of political opposition starting to come up in Germany. So I think we'll likely see some upheaval within the German politics this year with a replacement of people like Schultz, Baerbock, and others. I haven't had a chance to speak to Colonel McGregor since the drone incident that we just watched and talked about.

But when we last spoke, which was just a few days ago, he seemed to feel that the war can't go on for more than just a few more weeks, no matter what the United States tries to introduce, other than boots on the ground. If you're going to rely on just Ukrainian soldiers, there's just not going to be enough of them to resist. In other words, the so-called Ukrainian spring offensive will be co-opted by a Russian movement westward. Now, let's put this into context, Judge. The U.S. Department of Defense budget is approaching $850 billion. That's for funding the entire US military. The money that the United States has spent in Ukraine in the last year is around

$120 billion. Think of that. It's about 15% of our total defense budget. We cannot continue to spend at that rate. And we ourselves are conceding, our leaders are conceding that we don't have the factory, the industrial base to produce the artillery shells, the tanks, the artillery pieces, the high Mars rockets, you name it. We do not have an industrial base to produce that in any kind of timely manner. So where is Ukraine going to magically get the weapons that it ostensibly needs to defend itself? Let me ask the unthinkable. The Chinese covet Hawaii or Arizona. Unthinkable. Hypothetical.

Do we have the military equipment with which to resist that? The firepower to resist that? We would if we're defending Hawaii, but if we decide to project our force to go to Taiwan, we don't. And that's the critical issue here. The United States is well-equipped to defend itself, in part because of the oceans and the distance. And even with respect to Hawaii, the Chinese could not mount a naval force that would be undetected, that could approach Hawaii in the way that Tojo did back in World War II, leading to Pearl Harbor.

But you put your finger, I think, really where this conflict is headed. Because if you listen to the rhetoric in the United States, the declining interest in confronting the Russians, growing interest in confronting the Chinese. And that, I think, is another catastrophic decision. We can't seem to get off this idea that we need to fight everybody instead of finding ways to reach peaceful accommodations with other countries. All of this comes from, correct me or challenge it if you disagree, the neocon mindset in the State Department, the Victorian Newlands, the Tony Blinkens, who have wanted to fight these forever wars.

Yeah, no, listen, my son went to high school with the son of Paul Wolfowitz. I've known Paul since 1995, 1996. He's the prince of the, is he still alive? He's the prince of the neocons. Yeah, I think he's still alive. But he was, yeah, he was one of sort of the founders of it, at least pushing that forward. What we're seeing is that all of the various wars that they've been pushing,

the war in Yemen, the civil war in Syria, those are coming unglued as far as what the United States could do. And, you know, what's really sort of ironic is what we're watching take place in the Middle East now with the raw pro-shmup between the Saudis and Iran is the conflicts that were raging in Yemen and in Syria are starting to die down. The one in Yemen has ended. And all of a sudden we recognize maybe we were the instigators of the killing and the bloodshed. At least that's the message and perception that's coming across. And the Saudis, their break with us is so significant. Just the other day they announced

they're having formal diplomatic relationships with Hezbollah, the party of God based in Lebanon. Wow. Unheard of. I don't know if your friend or former friend is watching, but I did get a note. Paul Wolfowitz is alive and well. I'm happy you're alive and well, Paul. Larry and I disagree with you to the core, but I'm glad that you're alive and well.

And that will finish. Larry, thank you very much for jumping in on this, particularly the drone attack. You know, if we get more intel on it, we'll bring you back so you can explain it to our good viewers for us. Right. You're most welcome. Thank you. Thank you. More as we get it, of course, particularly on the unfolding story of the drones in the Kremlin. Judge Napolit your degree on your schedule. You may even be able to graduate sooner than you think by demonstrating mastery of the material you know. Make 2025 the year you focus on your future. Learn more at wgu.edu.