Judging Freedom - Leaked Docs & Leaker Arrest Breakdown w_ John Jordan

Episode Date: April 14, 2023

Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Friday, April 14, 2023. It's about 1.15 in the afternoon here on the East Coast of the United States. Our guest today is new to the program, John Jordan. John is a lawyer and an economist and is fluent in Russian and is an expert on Russian politics and is a former naval intelligence officer. So we have a lot about which to discuss. John, we have a lot of mutual friends, but you and I have not met before today. It's a pleasure. Welcome to the program. Likewise, Judge. Thank you. So let me ask you right off the bat, how can a 21-year-old part-time

Air National Guard guardsman possibly pass the level of scrutiny traditionally applied by the government before it gives a top secret SCI no foreign. The audience knows what that is. Security clearance. Well, there's some complexities. The military, unlike other areas of the government, is overwhelmingly young. Two-thirds of them- Did you say overwhelmingly young or overwhelmingly dumb? Overwhelmingly young. Two-thirds of the military is under 30, and most of them are under 25. 600,000 active service members are under 25 years old. And if you look, for example, you know, my service branch, the Navy, you look at the crews of submarines and aircraft carriers. These are overwhelmingly kids.

Even the officers, most of them are under 30. So you have so many between 18 and 24 handling nuclear weapons, all kinds of lethal munitions on all manner of ships. Marines are overwhelmingly young. The military is a place for young people. The second question, many of them do handle sensitive information or lethal devices as a matter of course. So this is a special challenge that the military has. How do you vet them? The vetting process normally spends a lot of time on who you're associated with as a young person, criminal background, financial issues. The traditional avenues that foreign adversaries would look to to compromise somebody, that is deep, dark personal secrets, money problems, any sort of

enticement that a foreigner would use. They also look for character. Now, when you're 21, you haven't done a lot for the most part, and your character isn't fully formed. And this is a challenge when you have the military, which basically can only be done by young people. People are at my age, I'm 50. Those are difficult jobs for older people. All right, did you get a chance before it was all taken down,

although I guess you can still see it somewhere, to look at any of these documents that the young man is accused of posting? Somebody posted them. The FBI says it was him, but obviously he's innocent until proven guilty. Did you look at the documents that were posted? Yes, I did. As many as I could. Okay, so you know, as a former Naval intelligence officer, these things were prepared, it appears, by the staff of the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff himself for the Joint Chiefs.

Why is a 21-year-old in Massachusetts even have access to that? Well, obviously he shouldn't. The way it works is a lot of these, what was posted online was what's called the finished product, right? It wasn't raw intelligence. It was write-ups that were taken from that. So obviously it's highly sensitive. The only way he could have gotten it is through his MOS, his specialty. And apparently he was in cyber systems and he was in IT.

And anybody in IT is going to naturally run across a lot of documents and run across a lot of information. So obviously IT in the old days, clerks, those are prime targets for foreign intelligence services. And by the way, I have not ruled out that a foreign service is not behind this. I'm not satisfied that there's more to this. There may be more to the story. And I think the FBI and the military are digging through that right now to determine if was he a lone wolf or was he acting at the behest of a foreign power? We can't rule that out just yet. The documents themselves address a variety of issues, some involving Israel, some involving Egypt, some involving South Korea. We'll put those

aside because we mainly want to talk about Ukraine. If the documents are true, they don't paint a very healthy picture of the American attitude about the likelihood of Ukraine either winning this war or at least stopping the Russians from moving westward. Are the documents credible or do they appear to have been altered in order to affect public opinion one way or another? It's hard to know. They could very well have been altered. The status of the war in Ukraine, basically, militarily, it's a race of the cripples. The Russian military is a mess. And our goal in helping Ukraine, regardless of where you stand on it, our goal is to make the Ukrainians just somewhat better or as much better than the Russians that we're able to.

But under no circumstances, given their manpower shortage, the resources involved, are we able to prop them up to the point where they're going to be as good as us? The goal here is to just make them slightly less crippled than the Russians. But is it not embarrassing and humiliating to the Biden administration to read in these documents that the government itself is not optimistic about the ability of Ukraine to defend itself, even with our assistance? Yeah, it's a huge embarrassment to the administration, no doubt. But bear in mind, Judge, the intelligence community, which I've been a part, has been wrong about the Russians were 10 feet tall. We were building weapons systems to counter things that we thought the Russians had that they never actually had. And we didn't realize until

much later that the Russian military and the Russian economy was a mess. We overestimated the Russian economy because we believed their economic systems. We've been wrong about this. We were wrong. The intelligence community thought the Russians would storm through Kiev just like the Putin thought the Russian intelligence services thought back so I mean the idea of the intelligence being wrong is not new who is more likely to be accurate the CIA or the Russian FSB that's another race of the cripples in a lot of ways. Our foreign intelligence services, obviously the CIA is a big part of it, the military, there's over a dozen different intelligence services. The FBI primarily deals with counterintelligence, detecting and disrupting foreign operations inside

the United States. The CIA and the military have been wrong about all manner of things, nevermind the inherent corruption and the politicization of those entities. But they've been wrong about this from the beginning. So I don't necessarily put a lot of credibility in that. There's a lot of group think and a lot of problems there. But the Russians have gotten this horribly wrong from the beginning as well. Let me go to one of your fields of expertise, which is your extraordinary facility in the Russian language and the Russian websites and

media entities that you visit on a regular basis. What is your opinion of President Putin's stability in office today in April of 2023 as compared to a year or two ago? There are a lot of great, there's a lot of clues in the Russian information space, their telegram channels about, right now there's a lot of people positioning. Prokofiev, the head of the Wagner Group, is trying to build himself up as a political entity and build a following inside of Russia. What is not widely known, Judge, is how hated and feared Prigozhin is by a lot of the Russian, the term is Solovikin, the security apparatus, the people that run the SVR, the FSB, and the military. They hate and fear him. And the stronger, and so right now, this is working to Putin's advantage because he's able to say, hey, you have to stick with me

because this is maybe the alternative. Now, when they come to believe that Putin is either too ill or they decide to replace him for other reasons, they will do so, but they will do it as much out of fear and loathing for Bogosian. And that's the real drama right now is Bogosian versus the Russian establishment, which is the security establishment, which right now is- Okay, so Bogosian is the guy that owns and operates with the assistance of financial assistance from the Russian government of the Wagner Group. Is the Wagner Group, we're just going to ask you this question about military, then I want to get back to Bogosian, and I want to ask you about Dmitry Medvedev. But is the Wagner Group a better fighting force than Russia's best full military

troops, whatever you want to call them, commandos, regular army, whatever you call them? Okay, the Russian, right now, no. Bogosian is down to, obviously, he's cleaning out prisons and drug dens and getting the lowest common denominators of Russian society. And they're using them as cannon fodder. The Wagner group was kind of a paper tiger. They had a few ex-former special forces, Spitznaz guys, and they were fighting in Africa. But there's a, there's a, in the West, and they were fighting in Africa. But there's a confusion. In the West, we often confuse brutality with competence,

and they're two very different ideas. And right now, the Grupo Wagnero, that's the Russian word for it, is largely people that are impressed into service with no training and are used in a meat grinder, horrible sort of way, and they're inflicting all kinds of horrible casualties and absorbing a lot of casualties, meat grinder, horrible sort of way. And they're inflicting all kinds of horrible casualties and absorbing a lot of casualties. And they're running out of people. So no, they're not better than the Russian military. The Russian military is bad, but in a different way. The Russian military, unlike ours, is conscripts. And they're only

in for about two years. We devote all, we've built people, some of the best and brightest America built entire careers in the military. We spend so much time on caring for people and training them up that we're dealing with the top end of American society in many ways. Well, the Russian military is the bottom end of Russian society. How popular and stable is President Putin today? I mean, how would you gauge his popularity? Joe Biden is down in the low 40s. Where is Putin today with whatever the Russian people know about and think about and hope about the war in Ukraine? Okay.

Well, looking at this as a political pundit, the polling in Russia is horrible. People don't want to respond. And there's a huge what we call non-response bias. People that don't like Putin are just not going to answer polls because they're fearful of government reprisal. The best polling in Russia comes out of an organization called the Levada Center. And it still shows that Putin is very popular. I think that's misleading. There's a lot of people that just don't want to answer, as I just mentioned. At the same time, in the Russian psyche, they confuse, they conflate loyalty to an individual with patriotism. In America, we can love our country and despise our leader.

That's not possible in the Russian mindset. And so they're going to cling to this, especially looking at the history of Putin and his predecessors. Putin ushered in a decade or more of prosperity for the Russian people when people like Yeltsin and Gorbachev presided over disaster. And so the Russian mind is still clinging to that. But when it collapses, it'll collapse bigly. Has the American sanctions damaged the Russian economy at all? Okay, so sanctions are, people look at them as like an on-off, like a toggle switch. It doesn't work that way. You institute them, and then it's a game of whack-a-mole, basically, because they're going to constantly try to find ways to circumvent it.

And we have to constantly be working to enforce those sanctions, whether it's by secondary sanctions, which is the most effective tool we have, which is sanctioning anybody that does business with Russia or does business with a sanctioned party. That's politically difficult, but we have to do it. And that's our most effective means of doing that. But sanctions are basically a declaration of an ongoing struggle, not an on-off switch. Last subject matter. How do you see the war in Ukraine ending? Right now, Russia has control over just about all of the eastern provinces that it wants. Putin could declare victory and go home.

He'd have a substantial border he'd have to defend. But how do you see this ending? So there are four provinces of Ukraine that Putin has claimed to, and they had these sham referenda. The Russians only control a big part of two of them, not all four. So right now, he doesn't control much that he didn't control before the invasion. Remember, Russian-speaking proxies and separatists controlled lots of the Donbass region, Donetsk and Luhansk, before the invasion. So unravel until he does. It's like we didn't predict the end of the Soviet Union accurately either. And so I think it's going to, this is, their casualties are many times what they absorbed in Afghanistan. And I think that it collapses from within. And frankly, you can hold me to this. I think it happens by the end of summer. The Dmitry Medvedev, who was the president of Russia

in a time when the Russian constitution prohibited, like ours, being elected president more than twice, and they changed the constitution. He's number two, I think, in the Russian Security Council today. Is he a likely successor or candidate to succeed Putin? And before you answer that, bear in mind his last public statement about the war, which is that Russian troops would go all the way to the Polish border and cross it.

Yeah, well, good luck with that. The Russian military can't even handle the Ukrainians, not alone Poland. But Poland, by the way, is a serious military power in Europe, far more so than is widely appreciated. So that's not happening. They say that a lot of the stuff that comes out of that, Judge, is for Russian audiences. It's to buck up the home front and deal with the nationalist community. So we make a mistake in overweighting that. So there are certain people to watch in Russia. I don't think that he is going to be the guy. I think if they do this, there's a change in Russia. It's going to be from a group of people that want to preserve the kleptocracy and preserve the system. So it's

not going to be some democratic movement. It's going to be people that are just as bad and just as corrupt to try to save themselves. Would you tell that to Victoria Nuland, please? Because she seems to think that Putin's going to be replaced by a Democrat. Uppercase D.

Yeah, that's not going to happen, right? I think maybe we have common ground on that. It'll be by a group that wants to save the system and save themselves. And that person is going to have to have a couple of qualities that Dmitry Medvedev does not have. It's going to be somebody that is part of the system that's trusted by the system, the major players, meaning the SCR, FSB, the military, and some financial interests. By the way, the oligarchs aren't powerful in Russia at all. That's a whole other topic. That's another mistake we make. But it's going to be somebody who can put a good face on a bad system. So it's not going to be somebody that says all the crazy

things that Medvedev does about nuclear weapons. They're going to want someone to kind of put the West to sleep, but it's still trusted by the system. So it's going to be, it's not going to be Medvedev. John Jordan, what a pleasure. I know you're in the green room of Newsmax, where I have a lot of friends and a lot of former Fox colleagues. Give them all my best. Enjoy your stay in New York. And thank you very much for taking time to join us, my friend.

We'll do it again. I look forward to it. Thanks for having me, Judge. Sure. More as we get it. Judge Napolitano for judging freedom.