Judging Freedom - MORE U.S. Weapons for Ukraine $500M _ w Larry Johnson fmr CIA

Episode Date: June 27, 2023

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Thank you for watching. Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Tuesday, June 27th, 2023. It's about 9.45 in the morning here on the East Coast of the United States. Larry Johnson joins us now. Larry, thank you very much. I can think of a few people that I want to speak to more than you right now about the latest events or the series of events in Russia during the past 72 hours. So big picture, what's your take on what happened with Yevgeny Prigozhin and the aborted march toward Moscow? Fundamentally, this was a Western attempt

to try to foment a coup in Russia. Prigozhin, I believe, was a winning participant in double-crossing the West, that he had, sort of like Luka Bratsky in The Godfather, he went to offer his services to the bad guys, this time NATO and Ukraine. But then he was going to, he turned it over to Russian intelligence and they exploited it. Are you saying that Prokofiev is and was a double agent? That's what I believe. Yes. Because if he wasn't, he'd be dead. You cannot betray Russia as he is alleged to have betrayed Russia and still be walking around alive, particularly if the number of airmen that are reportedly dead actually happened. I say, I question that simply because there has not been a lot of good video evidence to substantiate that.

So walk us through it. Did he provide intel to NATO? And did he provide them with stuff that they probably already had? What intel did he provide them with? So a friend of mine, Steve Bryan, who was a Defense Department official during the Reagan administration, he has sources that have confirmed to him that there was an approach made to Prigozhin during a trip to Africa, perhaps as late as January of 2023. And basically, he was pitched to come in and help the West. And it was portrayed as that, you know, Putin's corrupt, the country's weak, all we need to do is just push it over a little bit. And so he, Prokosian began to cooperate. Now, we were told through the documents that were released by Jack Taksera in the discord leaks, that Prokosian had passed information about the location of Russian troops,

which sounds pretty damning, except when you step back and realize, you know, as I've written, that's like taking a load of snow to Eskimos in January, because the United States already knew the location of Russian troops because we have intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance platforms that allow us to observe 24-7, the eye of Sauron, if you will, looking over the battlefield. But it was a way for Prokofiev to establish his bona fides. And then it was after that January meeting that Prokosian starts these crazy rants, and he's ranting about the corruption in the Department of Defense, which is pretty funny when you step back and realize that part of Prokosian's fortune,

he is a billionaire, came from his work as a caterer supplying the Department of Defense in Russia. So, you know, he was a contractor. He got all of his money that way. Plus, the other element in this, Prokosian has longstanding ties with the GRU, with military intelligence, and both in terms of the Internet Research Agency, the IRA, which is information operations, and then as the figurehead of Wagner, he didn't set it up. He didn't organize it. He didn't create it. He's just a figurehead,

a mouthpiece for it. And yet he's been portrayed in the West as the leader, the commander of Wagner, which is, you know, I think part of another information operation. So what did he have to gain? Before I ask, what did he have to gain? Wouldn't Western intel know that he was a double agent? No. Wouldn't they be surveilling him? I mean, this is almost ridiculous. Each side knows the other side is a spy. What is truth? Well, so understand what the West has been saying for years and believes firmly. They really believe that Putin is weak. They believe that Putin's got a terminal illness.

They believe that Putin is on his last legs. They believe that the Russian society is weak and divided and that there's lots of anger. So they've got this belief, this mindset. It's not true. It is absolutely divorced from reality, but that doesn't matter. That's what we believe in the West. You see it over and over and over with the comments of people from Anthony Blinken, Victoria Nuland, former CIA officials like John Cipher, David Petraeus, they all believe it. So it's just think about fishing. The fish only looks at the bait.

It doesn't look at the hook. So you figure out what the fish are biting on. And in this case, what's the West biting on? If you get, for instance, he doesn't have support. There's division in the military. And I can help pull it together the West is great we've only got our guy our guy that's gonna help us bring to fruition what we believe you know that's why I said he was a bit of what they call a dangle where you know what the other side wants they say hey

we we've got a beautiful woman dressed in a French maid outfit. Okay, there's a dancer in there. It's that kind of thing. And the West, and think about this, Judge. We say, well, gee, how could the West believe that Prokofiev would even have a chance to pull this off? I mean, that's crazy. Yeah, I agree. That is crazy. Except look at what the West is doing and funding military operations in ukraine

that have zero chance of success that's crazy doesn't stop the did the did the cia encourage this march toward moscow were were your former colleagues naive enough to think that Wagner would chase Vladimir Putin out of Moscow and Prokofiev would sit in his office? Yeah, that's another ridiculous element of this. The distance, if you will, from Rostov-on-Don, where they started, up to Moscow, 720 miles. I don't know if you've ever been on a road trip with about 100 trucks, because if you've got 3,000 troops, you figure you maybe can get 30 soldiers

in each vehicle to head north. That's about a 40 mile per hour trip. Do the math, it works out to almost 20 hours. And during that, you've got to stop and refuel all the trucks. And people have to go to the bathroom. So after 20 hours. And during that, you got to stop and refuel all the trucks and, you know, people have to go to the bathroom and, you know, you know, so after 20 hours, they're going to get out of the truck and storm the Kremlin, you know, they're going to be exhausted and, and, uh, drug out from that trip. So, you know, I, I, that was just some theater. There was no substance to it. It just didn't make sense. But here's the

key, Judge. The CIA was briefing Congress in advance of all of this. That means they knew. So how did they know? I don't think they intercepted a phone call of Bogosian calling up his mistress or whoever saying, hey, you know, on Friday, I'm going to launch a mutiny and be sure to watch the television. So it meant that there was human source, human contact. Some human being, maybe Prokofiev himself, told him what he was going to do and when he was going to do it. And it just happened to coincide with the end of a major NATO military exercise in Europe. Gary, do we have Secretary Blinken from over the weekend? Here's his summary of the state of affairs. I doubt you're going to agree with, and you probably will want to challenge everything he says, but here's Blinken as only he can say it. We've seen this aggression against Ukraine become a strategic failure across the board.

Russia is weaker economically, militarily. Its standing around the world has plummeted. It's managed to get Europeans off of Russian energy. It's managed to unite and strengthen NATO with new members and a stronger alliance. It's managed to alienate from Russia and unite together Ukraine in ways that it's never been before. This is just an added chapter to a very, very bad book that Putin has written for Russia. Well, it makes my point. Yeah, you do make your point.

Yeah, what I said earlier, that's what the West believes. Oh, they're weak. They're falling apart. They're isolated. They have no support. And here comes Progozhin. Hey, I'll help you overthrow him. Okay, guy, you're our man. You know, ridiculous. Here's Progozhin. Now, this is a statement. It's audio only with a photo of him. But it appears to have been a statement that he made after this was over and after he was in Belarus. I will read the subtitles for the benefit of our friends who are experiencing

Judging Freedom audio only. We started our march because of injustice. On the way, we did not kill a single soldier on the ground. In a day, we were only 200 kilometers away from Moscow. We entered and completely took control of the city of Rostov. The civilians were glad to see us. We showed a master class on how 24 February 22 should have looked like. We did not have the goal of overthrowing the existing regime and the legally elected government, which we said many times. We turned around in order not to shed the blood of Russian soldiers. Believable, Larry? No. What was he doing?

So you see how his story changed. On Friday, he said the reason he was doing this is because the entire reason for invading Ukraine was based on lies. Lies that Shoigu and Gerasimov had told Putin. It was a totally fraudulent venture. It was a lie. Now on Monday, he's changed his tune. He'd done a complete 180. Oh, we're just, it's just a protest.

And no, we don't want to overthrow the government. The, you know, it's always possible that he was, in fact, doing the bidding of Western intelligence agencies and realized it was poorly planned and it failed. But I do believe that Russian military intelligence got wind of the plot and they were able to move troops into positions along the border up north, north of Kharkiv and north and east of Kiev. So the Russians were able to mask troop movements as responses to this coup, when in fact it was being carried out for the practical considerations with respect to the war in Ukraine. Is Prokosin long for the world, Larry? We'll find out.

If he was a winning cooperator with Russian intelligence and carrying this off, he'll be alive. If he was a traitor, if he went over to the West and tried to cut a deal, he's a dead man. There's no way he should survive, could survive. I mean, look at what we in the West are getting ready to try to do to Julian Assange for simply publishing a video that got leaked to him. You know, and here is Prokosian, who allegedly may have been responsible for giving orders that led to the deaths of 30 Russian airmen. You know, that cannot stand.

You mentioned earlier that there may be some doubt about this, but did the Wagner Group, as Western media has reported, shoot down Russian Army helicopters that were shooting at them? That's the report. Again, I have monitoring some of the telegram channels. They're usually pretty quick about putting up that kind of evidence and showing either footage or the aftermath. I do think it's possible that, you know, with all this, you know, nobody was going to tell Prokofiev's lower-level troops,

hey, guys, we're pulling off a fake coup, so just, you know, nobody was going to tell Prokosian's lower level troops, hey, guys, we're pulling off a fake coup. So just, you know, cool your jets. No, they had to believe it was the real thing. And it looked like the real thing. But I believe that the Russian intelligence and Russian leadership had it under control the entire time. But it's possible that some of the Prokosian's troops may have actually fired a surface-to-air missile that brought down a helicopter, too. I'm just not in a position to verify it one way or the other, and the MOD has been somewhat reserved in commenting on it. Here's President Putin himself on today's Tuesday, on Sunday evening, with an English translation. The mutineers betrayed their country, their people,

and they betrayed those who they dragged into this affair, who they pushed to shoot at their comrades. It is this fratricide that the new Nazis in Kiev and their Western masters wanted to see, and the various traitors as well. They wanted to see Russian soldiers kill each other. They wanted to see Russian servicemen and civilians die, and ultimately to see Russia defeated. And the Russian society split apart. So, since the very beginning, I gave orders to prevent bloodshed, and we needed time for that, including to give an opportunity to those who realize they've made a mistake to rethink their decision, to realize that they're putting society at risk

and that this is leading to destructive consequences as a result of this reckless affair. I thank the soldiers and commanders of the Wagner Group who made the only correct decision and refused to engage in a fratricide and who stopped at the last line. Who refused to engage in fratricide. Very consistent with your theory that underlies this. this can only be described as a bizarre affair. I mean, who gained from all of this? Tony Blinken and company claim Putin is weakened. To me, if anything, he's strengthened. Were there any crowds that were hailing the Wagner group as they were marching toward Moscow?

Of course not. He still has an 82 or an 86 percent approval rating. Joe Biden can't even see those numbers from where his numbers are. Every significant political figure in Russia, across the board, whether from the level of mayor to our equivalent of a governor, to legislators in the Duma, to members of the cabinet, all came out in support of Putin, including people from like the Communist Party. The Communist Party is a minority party and don't like Putin. Even they came out and sided with Putin or Prigozhin.

You didn't have, as you correctly observed, people rushing into the street to protest the oppression of the Putin government. It was just the opposite. Now, turn the tables. Can you imagine if that was a coup attempt against Joe Biden? Can you imagine every mayor and governor and senator and member of Congress coming out and said, oh, no, we're with Joe Biden. That wouldn't happen here in the United States. So the level of support that he could prove now, because there is, I think part of Putin's hope was that this whole affair, because he genuinely believed and understood the West was trying to get rid of him. The West was trying to foment a civil war in Russia. This was not play acting.

This was not pretend. It was real in that sense. But Russia was able to detect it and disrupt it in advance. And what it then is Russian people are solidly behind Putin. And if Blinken and these other crazy people on the side continue to push this nonsense that Putin is just hanging on by a thread and that all we've got to do is keep pushing and he'll disappear, they're going to push us into a nuclear war. Or did the leadership at Langley of the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and whoever else might have been aware of this, actually expect and hope that it would succeed? Or did they know that this is the way it was going to end?

Absolutely hope that it was going to succeed. In fact, I heard from one of my retired buddies who was in contact with one of his friends, still active, and they've come to the conclusion that this was, in fact, what they call Russian deception, Moskowrovka, that the CIA played. They got fooled, as did British intelligence. What do you think becomes of the war now? Most of Prigozhin's ranting and raving was against Defense Minister Shoigu, whom you and Doug McGregor and others have said is pretty well respected around the world. Does he stay in his job? Does President Putin accelerate the aggression with which the war is being fought?

Well, yeah, that's what was the other curious thing about this coup, that if it was a real coup and the Russians thought that they're going to lose control, you would have expected there to have been a pause or a real glitch in their military operations. It was just the opposite. They were still launching cruise missiles and other aerial bomb attacks across Ukraine during that entire affair, have not missed a beat. They've continued to advance and chew up what is left of this Ukrainian counteroffensive. And what we're seeing, you know, some very disturbing images. There is one Ukrainian commander throwing a hand grenade into a bunker with his troops because they wouldn't follow his orders and go out and fight. Wait a minute. You're telling me the Ukrainian commander assassinated his own troops?

Yes, yes. Yeah, the thing has gone viral on Telegram. You see him arguing and hollering at him and telling him to get with him. Then he runs outside, pulls the pin on a grenade, tosses it in, and boom, it goes off. So you're getting a number, as Doug McGregor correctly noted as well, you're getting an increasing number of soldiers go to to carry operations. We just lost you, Larry, when you said an increasing number of soldiers.

What are they doing or refusing to do? Yeah, they're refusing to carry out orders and to operate. So they're disabling tanks. They're staying in the barracks. So it's not like... What's your feel for where the war will be at the end of the summer? At the end of the summer, it will be in an even more desperate situation than it is now. I mean, the West is scratching their head trying to figure out what to do. They provided all the wonder weapons, the Wunderwaffen.

So left to go are attack missiles, cluster munitions, and F-16s. They may decide to push those into theater, but that's only going to anger and stiffen Russian resolve. It is not going to change the situation on the battlefield. That's the key. And as you go into the fall, Ukraine's ability to conduct operations will be in. Larry Johnson, always a pleasure, my dear friend.

Thank you for joining us. Thank you. More as we get it. Judge Napolitano for judging freedom. Thank you.