Judging Freedom - Larry Johnson: How Trump Hurt Ukraine

Episode Date: July 1, 2024

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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 for Judging Freedom. Today is Monday, July 1st, 2024. In just a moment, Larry Johnson will be here on. Are you ready for this? What did President Trump do in office that has now produced an escalation in Ukraine? But first this. You all know that I am a paid spokesperson for Lear Capital, but I'm also a customer, a very satisfied customer. About a year ago, I bought gold and it's now increased in value

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have predicted this $3,200 an ounce gold. Learn about how to transfer this to an IRA. Protect your savings. 800-511-4620, learjudgenap.com. Tell them the judge sent you. Larry, my dear friend, welcome to the show. You know, it's interesting how decisions made in the past can have unexpected consequences. What did President Trump do or order or authorize, I think it was back in 2019, that is having an effect today? He withdrew the United States from the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty, the INF Treaty. That treaty up to that point prohibited or put limits on both

the United States and Russia's ability to build intermediate ballistic missiles, cruise missiles that would travel anywhere from 300 to 3,000 miles. And so that's particularly relevant. You know, the Russians have intercontinental ballistic missiles that can reach us, but this is more trying to calm things down in Europe. So Trump pulls out of it, and it wasn't Trump's. You know, Trump didn't wake up one morning and say, oh, you know, I'm going to get rid of that agreement. He was recommended to him by, frankly, all these deep state operatives that he had put into his administration.

Let's say his secretary of state at the time was Mike Pompeo. Yeah, just complete buffoons. put into his administration. His secretary of state at the time was Mike Pompeo. Yeah. Just complete buffoons. So it's one thing. Okay, we're going to withdraw from that treaty. So you think the next step is let's start building those missiles, right? Wrong. We didn't do that because we couldn't do that.

Meanwhile, Russia was putting out hypersonic missiles, but they were staying within the limits still of that treaty. That all ended on Monday. Monday, Vladimir Putin convened a National Security Council meeting in Russia. He said, look, the United States is now talking about putting these intermediate nuclear weapons into Europe. We're going to respond in kind. Big difference here is Russia can actually produce those missiles and deploy them while the West cannot. Okay. That's the fundamental difference. A couple of questions. One, I'm remembering

Ronald Reagan's famous one-liner. He had a number of them, as you know. Trust but verify. Right. Are the Russians trustworthy when we sign treaties with them? Did they, as far as you know, maybe Ritter knows this, but you know this stuff as well. Yeah. Did they comply with this treaty? Absolutely. Did we?

No. No. I mean, look, we are the ones that across the board have been abrogating these treaties. At no point did the Russians say, hey, you know what? We made a bad deal. Let's get out of this. No. It was George W. Bush that pulled us out of the anti-ballistic missile treaty back in 2001. And guess what? The Russians protested it initially. So what are you doing? Because they saw this as opening up a road for a country taking offensive action. Because if you work on developing anti-ballistic missile defenses, that means you're working to prevent anybody from attacking you,

which means you have the ability to attack them. And yet the United States walked away from it. And once again, it's not like we went to work, say, oh, yeah, let's upgrade that Patriot missile system. Let's come up with a robust air defense system. No, we're still using, you know, 30, 35 year old technology. Didn't spend any of the money on that. It's all the contractors in northern Virginia got that money. They bought a bunch of houses. They got some fancy cars, but none of them went to improve U.S. national security. Russia, meanwhile, has built the S-400, the S-500, the S-550. And these are all very robust,

capable air defense systems that outmatch anything that we can field. Why are the Russians ahead of us when it comes to the ability to build these things? Their economy is not held hostage to a congressional prostitution process. That's the only way to call it. The members of Congress are like hired prostitutes. The defense contractors are the paying customers. So, you know, they go out and pay the members of Congress and the members of Congress pony up favors. Only these favors are not sexual. They are monetary in nature. They provide all the money to the defense contractors. And so like right now, Russia is building 155 millimeter artillery shells at a pace

about five to six times what the United States does. And they're producing them for about $1,000 a shell. United States, we're paying $4,000 a shell. So, you know, four times the price and we're only getting maybe, you know, one-fifth, one-sixth the turnout. Is the Russian munitions industry owned by the government or is it private enterprise like it is here? No, the government owns it. And so the government says, you know, if it needs to get done, it's going to get done. But they've got some flexibility. They're tied in.

They're actually tied into a central plan. And so when it comes to defense spending, we actually ought to have a central plan. I'm not talking about the Soviet Union's central economic planning, which made the Soviet economy a disaster. When it comes to building up your defense products, you're building what you need to defend your country and to make sure your soldiers, sailors, marines, airmen can carry out operations with the best equipment that is integrated at a strategic and tactical level. Russia has that.

We don't. Okay. Let's get back to where we started. How did Trump's decision in 2019 affect what's going on on the ground or in the air in Ukraine today? So by ending that treaty, number one, and again, it was set in motion by people working for Trump, but nonetheless, he signed off on it. It now put in place this notion that the United States

is going to push these intermediate missiles and cruise missile and ballistic missiles into Europe. And so this is like a reprise of the Cuban Missile Crisis, except it's in reverse. So it's the Russians who are looking at the United States talking about bringing these intermediate nuclear missiles in. And Vladimir Putin was very clear on Monday when he convened the National Security Council,

which you had Foreign Minister Lavrov, you had the new Defense minister Belousov. And he said, OK, guys, here's the situation. This is what we're doing. They're doing. This is what we're going to do to counter it. Tell me how you're going to get this accomplished. So this is now ratcheting it up.

Do they have these missiles on the shelf? Could they use them against Kiev tomorrow? Well, yeah, they certainly have, as they have been over the last two years. They've got the Kinshals, Iskanders. So they've got a variety of hypersonic missiles right now that they could use to hit Kiev in a heartbeat. What they have not developed are those hypersonics that they would hit London and Paris. That's what they're going to start producing. And so that, you know, they've recognized they're at war with the West. There's no more pretense.

They're no longer pretending that they're in some sort of peaceful coexistence with NATO. They recognize that NATO has declared war on Russia. NATO is taking provocative steps both to arm Ukraine as well as to put weapon systems in countries adjacent to Russia's borders that Russia views as a direct potential nuclear threat. They made it clear they'll respond to take those out. If we were not complying with the treaty, did Mike Pompeo and his colleagues know that? And if they did, why on earth did they give this advice to Trump?

Oh, they justified it by saying, oh, the Russians are cheating. They didn't offer any evidence of the Russians cheating. But, you know, I tell you the reason they ultimately did it. There's some money to be made. You know, hey, we get out from under those restraints. We can now, there's a whole new pack of weapons. We can have this defense industry build. Their only problem with their calculations is critical weapons system the United States builds, it's dependent on China. That if China cuts us off, we can't build those weapons systems anymore.

And so what's our brilliant response? Hey, let's go to war with China. Let's put sanctions on China. Let's threaten China. And it's like, you know, if you're trying to get a date with a girl, the last thing you want to do is call her fat and ugly. Okay. Here's some breaking news, which is not very good. A missile attack has been launched on Crimea and Sevastopol. Local telegram channels have reported the strikes were reportedly carried out by the Ukrainian army. Now, this is where I need you to help us, Larry, with the use of storm shadow missiles on the Balakalovsky thermal power

plant and the territory of the military unit. As a result, an explosion and fire occurred. The governor of Sevastopol said that the air defense system was activated and five missiles were shot down. He also said that several cars were damaged during the attack. No casualties have been reported so far. What are storm shadows? Are they U.S. or British? Those are British. That's the British version of like our attack of missiles. It goes a little farther than the attack of missiles. I think it's maximum range is about 210. If this report is accurate, you have the Ukrainian military using Western gear,

here British, to attack civilians in Sevastopol, as if what happened on the beach two Sundays ago wasn't enough. Right. And the good news out of that, it looks like the Russian air defense system once again worked to down those. They hit them, but this is the problem. You've seen those videos out of people at a Middle East wedding where they're firing their machine guns up in the air. The bullets go up. There's this thing called gravity. They come back down.

And so when you shoot down one of these missiles, it doesn't disintegrate it. So there's metal chunks and pieces that fall to the ground and can severely injure, if not kill, civilians or actually military personnel. So mainstream media has been stating that that's what happened two Sundays ago on Sevastopol, that they shot down a missile and the debris from it, which included cluster bombs, landed on the beach, as if it's the fault of the Russians that their own people were killed.

It was American gear. It was American technology. It was American intel. It was American technology. It was American Intel. It was American human beings downloading the Intel. Yeah. This was, again, I go back to the simpler analogy that people can understand easily. This was the mother who gave her six-year-old child a gun and loaded it for him. Didn't necessarily say, hey, go shoot teacher X. But once you give the loaded gun to that kid, all of a sudden, when they pull the trigger, you are as responsible as the person pulling the trigger or pressing that trigger. And in this case, the United States, by giving them

these, you know, they gave them the loaded gun, the attack of missiles. And then they gave them the intelligence information required to target those missiles. And then they were providing the training and assistance to the Ukrainians so they'd know how to launch those missiles. Probably the only thing they didn't do was say, hey, see if you can kill a few civilians on the beach. I don't think the Americans did that. But who cares? Because at this point, you're an accessory to murder. That's all it is. Who has hypersonic missiles today?

Russia and China. United States doesn't. In fact, how far do they go? Can something fired from Moscow hit the mainland U.S.? Well, yes, but it's not so much the distance involved, it's the speed involved. So the hypersonic, as I understand it, is basically Mach 5 and above. And what's happened is not only do they go extremely fast,

because one of the technical issues that a lot of the United States has run into is when you have a rocket or a ballistic missile traveling that fast through the atmosphere, just like we saw a spacecraft returning from space, they would burn up the bottoms of them because of the heat of the friction from passing through the air. So that was one of the real challenges that the Russians and Chinese had to solve.

They solved it. We haven't. And so those missiles, not only do they move fast, but they are also maneuverable, which means they can't be shot down, despite all the claims of the Ukrainians. Oh, we shot down 100 of them. It's nonsense. They haven't shot them down. Why is it that we don't have them?

I guess we haven't thrown enough money at the defense contract. God knows we've been throwing a lot. $886 billion a year, and they can't build these missiles that our adversaries have, supposed adversaries. It's just symptomatic of the further decline of the United States, which was once an industrial technological leader in the world. Right now, we got two astronauts up in space that they can't get back to Earth because we don't have a damn rocket to bring them back on. Ours broke.

So now we're going around like some panhandler going to Elon Musk. Hey, Elon, could you give us a lift? We've got to pick up in outer space. And worst of all, we have to go beg the Russians because the Russians have been the one up until about two years ago that were regularly taking our astronauts to the space station because we no longer had the rocket capability. Well, if we can't build a rocket that can get to the space station because we no longer had the rocket capability. Well, if we can't build a rocket that can get to the space station, why in the name of God do we

think we could build one that would be hypersonic that nobody could shoot down? Have the Russians stopped cooperating with us because of the war in Ukraine and because Tony Blinken won't talk to Sergey Lavrov? Not entirely. They put us on notice that, hey, you know, our joint space station thing? Yeah, that's done. We're going our own way. Have a nice day. They're going to move off and they will develop their own. They'll work with the Chinese. They'll work with the Indians. And to be candid about it, the leading countries right now in terms of outer space exploration are China, India, and Russia, not the United States. So the United States, which prided itself in the 60s on, we are the first ones to the moon and all that. Boy, talk about living on our laurels. There's no laurels left to live on.

How do you read Foreign Minister Lavrov's statement to the American ambassador to Russia, we are no longer at peace with you? Tell your buddies, your colleagues in Washington. Yeah, it put us on notice that you're one step from war. And there's already talk of the Russians downgrading diplomatic relations so that they could, you know, withdraw most of their diplomatic personnel back to Russia. In fact, the United States has already taken punitive action against the Russian embassy here. They've shut down visa centers that were in New York and Washington, D.C., because they're

wanting to make it more difficult, if not impossible, for any American to travel to Russia. So, for example, if I go back to Russia, I'm going to have to either fly to like Istanbul and spend a day or two there watering the city and going to the embassy to get a visa or go to a place like Mexico City. So, you know, the United States, instead of taking steps to try to calm the crisis, trying to say, let's recognize we're both nuclear powers. The last thing we need to do is have two countries that are nuclear powers at each other's throats. Let's find a way, a peaceful path forward. Get Joe Biden to say that three times quick, huh? Please.

But we're not doing that. And then what we saw out of the presidential debate a week ago Thursday, the rest of the world has now awakened and gone, good God, nobody's in charge. Yeah. Nobody's in charge. In fact, that's the question.

Who's calling the shots? Who do we talk to? When Joe Biden decides to send a few hundred million to Israel, genocide notwithstanding, who actually makes that decision, Larry? Do we know? No. No, we don't. It's likely, you know, we know that probably Jake Sullivan's involved. Maybe Anthony Blinken, the chief of staff, really Biden's chief of staff.

And I don't recall his name. I need to get it committed to memory because that's that's the real guy running the country. That chief of staff is the one who's signing off, who's making the decisions. And we don't know what kind of person he is. Is Israel attacking Hezbollah as we speak? Yes. Yeah. No, they're launching airstrikes. And hey, Hezbollah's turning around and giving it back as good as they're getting. Does not the IDF and does not Prime Minister Netanyahu recognize what you and everybody else on this show has said, that Hezbollah is not Hamas and you're going to get more than a bloody nose? No, no, they don't. I mean, they are in, they've grown up to start believe their own nonsense.

And that's what's dangerous. You know what? It's one thing to look in the mirror and tell yourself you're the best athlete in the world, even though, you know, when you come and get an objective assessment and say, let me see if I got this right. You're 5'5", you weigh 350 pounds, and you haven't walked a block in three years. I don't think you're going to get that athlete designation. And that's where we are. I mean, we literally, you've got Israel thinking, oh, we got the best military. We got the most

professional military. They say that. And then what we've watched over the last eight months in Gaza, where you've got Israeli troops completely out of control, completely undisciplined, no good combat leadership. You've got troops shooting their own people, for God's sake, and not just once, on multiple occasions. And so you've demonstrated that the only thing the Israelis are good at are killing women and children. Did you recently write, or maybe you told me, that the IDF is exhausted and fearful and does not want to go to take on Hezbollah? Well, that's been written. I have not written that myself precisely, but that has been reported. You've got reservists who are saying, no, no, we're done.

And plus the psychological, you know, the Israelis are running into the same thing that the German Wehrmacht, the professional soldiers ran into when they invaded Poland and then Ukraine, the territory we now know as Ukraine back in World War II. Remember when they were lining up all these Jewish civilians and men, women, and children in pits and shooting them. Well, what they discovered, and this is why the gas chambers were ultimately developed, is it caused tremendous psychological trauma to a lot of these soldiers. They weren't all monsters.

They were still human beings. And all of a sudden, they were sitting there recognizing they had killed children, babies. They had killed young women. They'd killed people that looked like their mothers. And it was psychologically damaging them. And the professional part of the German Wehrmacht, not the SS, but the Wehrmacht, they came forward and said, okay, this has got to stop because you're making our guys' combat ineffective. And that's one of the main motivations that led to the development of first the gas fans and then later the actual gas chambers. Are IDF soldiers who are not by and large professionals, who are basically draftees, are they suffering from the same, whatever you want to call it,

blowback from slaughtering Palestinians? Absolutely. Yeah, there's a growing number. There have been reports in the Israeli press, not just Haaretz, sort of the left-leaning one, but in others, that the number of traumatized reservists that have served in Gaza and been witness to these things, they're in great need of counseling. And you're getting suicides. You're getting some of the same things you've seen within our own military personnel, where people who were just ultimately stressed out by the combat against civilians ended up taking their own lives.

So I don't know if you know this person, but the president of the United States is... We got a president? I just lost his name. Jeff Zients. Z-I-E-N-T-S. I don't know this fellow. Do you?

No, I don't. But, you know, and he, I didn't even hear, you know. Usually you hear about the Washington insiders like Ron Klain, who used to be the chief of staff. Right. Ron was very well known. Ron even used to show up at Fox when I was there, but this Jeff Zientson never heard of. Yeah, never heard. And so this is the power behind the throne. Now, what's fascinating is watching the food fight that's underway as the Biden families are blaming Jeff and Anita Dunn and some others. This is all your fault that Joe stared off into space and couldn't remember what he was saying. Accountability, American style. while. Right, right. Just as an aside, Judging Freedom is up to 399,936 subscriptions. So we may break 400,000 while you and I are chatting. And if not, it'll be very, very shortly thereafter.

For all the work you've done for us, I thank you, Larry, from the bottom of my heart. This is just an extraordinary number. Our goal was 400,000 by the 4th of July, which is Thursday. Our next goal is a half a million by Christmas, but we exceed 20,000 a month. We have six months till Christmas, so we should be able to reach that. How much longer do you ukraine uh can go on no matter what jeff zainz sends over there yeah well there was already reports today of an attempted coup that was thwarted so this is start you know it's starting to unraveling faster and as we talked about a lot on friday uh when you when you had uh zelensky now saying time is short and boy we're getting a lot of dead and wounded and since since he said that, the number of dead and wounded have been going up dramatically.

And what we're looking at here is a more rapid unraveling of Ukraine than many expected. The Biden folks are hoping and praying they can keep it intact until after the election, because the last thing they want to see is another August debacle like happened in Afghanistan in August of 2020. Right. Larry Johnson, it's a pleasure, my dear friend. I know we covered both Ukraine and Israel and the White House, but thank you very much for your time. Much appreciated. We won't have time because we have the four-day weekend, which is so nice for the Intelligence Roundtable, but I look forward to seeing you back here on Monday when we should be well over 400,000.

We may have some stories to tell by then. Who knows? Correct. Thank you, Larry. God love you. All the best. Happy Fourth of July to you and your family. Thanks, Judge.

To you and your team, the same. Thank you. Thank you. Coming up tomorrow at 8 o'clock a.m., Pepe Escobar. At 10.15 a.m., Ambassador Charles Freeman, former ambassador and high-ranking official in the State Department, who has a lot of tales to tell about how policy is made. At 11 o'clock tomorrow morning, the inimitable Scott Ritter. At 2 o'clock tomorrow afternoon, Matt Ho. At 3 o'clock tomorrow afternoon, Lieutenant Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski. Judge Napolitano for judging

freedom. Thanks for watching!