Judging Freedom - WEST PUSHING A NEW TERRORISM MEME IN RUSSIA w Larry Johnson

Episode Date: April 5, 2023

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Larry Johnson returns to the show. Always a pleasure, Larry. Thank you. Thank you, Judge. Of course. And my viewers, thank you as well, Larry. You can't always see all the comments and emails, but they are legion because we do. I don't know if they all know how far back you and I go and you providing me with information in a field about which I was once, some would say still am, ignorant.

You're my great teacher and everybody should know that. And we're deeply grateful that now you teach a lot of people uh including me on this show since last we were together some uh unique uh events happened and i don't know if there's a connection uh between these events which was assassinated in a Moscow cafe, and a Wall Street Journal reporter was arrested by Russian security forces in eastern Russia and accused of espionage. Any connection here either to each other or to the military activities, the American military activities in Ukraine? No, I don't think there's any connection between those.

The assassination of Vladlin, the terrorist attack on him in the cafe, that is part of a longstanding Ukrainian effort to go after dissidents. Remember last August, Darina Dujina was killed. She was in a car that was blown up. It was supposed to be her father, and she made the mistake of taking the car that he was going to take. So both her father and this fellow Tartosky, as I understand it, correct me, Larry, are nationalists tugging at Putin from the right. They're not peaceniks tugging at Putin from the center or the left.

Well, yeah, it's not so much that they're tugging at Putin. They're seen, they've been very outspoken about what's going on in Ukraine, and the Ukrainians see them as an enemy. I mean, frankly, Scott Ritter's on that list. These guys were on the list that the Ukrainians were wanting to kill. So, you know, I know Scott can take care of himself, but this guy was, he was whacked. They're using Russian extremists as a cover. That's what the Ukrainians are using as a cover

to try to divert attention away from them. All right, so how was, without getting too graphic, how was he killed? They planted a bomb inside a statue. It was a bust, you know, like a head shot of him. And this woman was asked to carry it in. The question remains whether or not she was actually witting that she knew that it carried a bomb. I don't think so, because if she knew it had a bomb in it, she would not have stayed there sitting in the room.

Vladlin asked her, oh, come over here and sit down. So she was sitting up close to the front, which would, you know, you wouldn't do that if you knew there was a bomb in there getting ready to go off. And this bomb exploded, this is a bust of himself, she sits down, it explodes, it kills him, does it harm her? No, it did not harm her. So apparently she either got out just before it went off or was shielded from the blast by his body. There were other people that that about 40 people were reported wounded so so this has no military significance this is just an act of vengeance by the ukrainian intel yeah the hit look the history of terrorism acts is terrorism acts do not have any strategic effect whatsoever

on any conflict uh the the only strategic effect they have is it enables governments to impose more draconian laws and control. You saw what happened like after the aftermath of 9-11 in the United States, people were more than willing to let the government start spying on them. You know, the Patriot Act was passed and people rally around the government at that time. So, you know, these are really sort of, in my view, counterproductive, but they sure get the Irish up and the Russians over this. That's for sure. So where did this assassination take place? In Moscow? In St. Petersburg.

St. Petersburg. In a cafe in St. Petersburg. Can we conclude thatian intel is physically present much too much to putin's chagrin in saint petersburg oh yes no they're they're going to operate i mean in any decent intelligence service and ukrainians do have a competent intelligence service they're going to be able to operate in a variety of areas the question though is can they mount because the west is putting a lot of uh betting i guess betting quite a bit of money on the fact that we can stir up an insurgency inside russia that will force putin from office and lead

to a collapse of society that's that's just a pipe dream that's not going to happen um and they're they're they assume that they could do to Russia what they, what the United States did to the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, stir up a big insurgency domestically. And they ignore the fact of Russia's been through this before. Starting in 1999, the Chechens, the Chechen region with a Muslim extremist started a massive terrorist campaign against the Russian government. And the Russians crushed it. They did it brutally, but they crushed it. So they've been through this before. They've been through dealing with Chechen terrorists setting off bombs in Moscow and subways and in airports. And Russia doesn't, you know, they don't melt into a puddle

and start crying. They step up and take care of business. So the assassination of Tartusky, just like the accidental murder of Dugino, these are just pinpricks, maybe even less than pinpricks. Go ahead. How about the arrest of the Wall Street Journal reporter. Is that a one-off or is he the Brittany Griner of 2023? Is this the new diplomacy? We'll grab one of yours, you grab one of ours, because I don't know if the public knows this, but two weeks before he was arrested, the Americans arrested a guy who claimed to be a Brazilian soccer player. His real name was Sergei Cherkozov,

and he wasn't a Brazilian soccer player, according to the FBI. He was a Russian spy. I don't know, but is this where we're going? Yeah, I think that's the most likely explanation. A lot have been, you know, they've tried to make the case that Evan Gervich was a quote spy working for the CIA. The CIA is legally prohibited from hiring and recruiting journalists, at least US journalists and journalists that work for US publications. It's not to say that the CIA could not have hired some foreigner under waiting for a foreign newspaper if they wanted to try to collect information. That'd be decent tradecraft. But putting a reporter that works for the Wall Street Journal, that's not covert. That's not clandestine. That's about as open as you can get.

It's not clear whether or not he was actually lured to the site he was uh outside of moscow and was asked you know sort of enticed to try to collect some information so that the uh basically being entrapped uh there's a lot we don't know about that i've seen reports claiming he was trying to plant some device uh then would have some links to the national security Agency. Again, I find that pretty far-fetched. What people forget, and I made a point and received a lot of criticism, but journalists, part of the beauty of a journalist is that they can report on secrets

that the government does not want them reporting on. And what we've seen happen over the last 20 years is the criminalization of journalism. That any journalist like Cy Hirst, which Cy has written, could he could be accused of being a spy of conducting espionage, helping the Russians. But we need journalists like that because in my experience when top-secret information leaks it's usually because the government is doing something wrong. It's acting illegally. It's acting improperly.

And it's hiding behind security clearances as a way to just keep the American public ignorant. And from that standpoint, the journalists need to be protected. I had a discussion with my brother-in-law over this because he was saying, how is this not espionage? And the part of the espionage is if you've been recruited as an asset, you're going to pass information to me that I'm going to then publish on the inside, but it's going to be kept secret. It's not going to go public. What Evan Gershkovich was doing, he was collecting information and writing it up in the Wall Street Journal. I found a lot of his reporting really pretty pathetic. He was not doing aggressive reporting inside of Russia. Instead, he was repeating a lot of what I call propaganda memes. But that said, one of the central foundations of our nation's security as a republic is a fourth estate,

a free, independent journalist sector. And unfortunately, we don't really have that anymore in the United States. We've got a lot of media that's gone the way of becoming corporate lackeys. And it's people like you having shows like this, where you at least try to break through that corporate control of media that has become so dominant. We also have media being mouthpieces for MI6 and CIA. And we hate to say it because I work for Fox, which has a common ownership to the Wall Street Journal, but the Wall Street Journal is quintessentially a mouthpiece for MI6 and CIA, maybe even more so than the New York Times. Well, you know, when I first got my security clearances and finally was read into

all these programs and then started reading what was in the New York Times and the Washington Post, I quickly came to realize as long as there was some agreement or consensus within the intelligence community, the policy defense community, the information was not leaking. It was only when there was a disagreement that information would leak, or if the administration wanting to push a particular policy would allow that information to be put into the newspapers, and they would happily publish it. But I also saw as how the CIA worked in covert action to put place articles in other publications around the world where it was not attributable, not obviously attributable to the intelligence community. That happened, you know, that was happening 35 years ago. And I'm sure it's become more sophisticated now with the electronic media. Would CIA have been aware of Gershkovitz being in the crosshairs of FSB? Yeah, I've raised another possibility, one other possibility.

The CIA could have been sending out signals that in fact Gershkovitz was working for them just in order to get, to bait the Russians to have them pick him up and to create this sort of incident. Now, why would CIA want this incident, Larry? Because it reinforces the image of the Russian as an authoritarian state. What the agency is concerned about now is the erosion in the United States of support for this war effort in Ukraine. So anything we can do to rally Americans, look what these people are doing, you know, they're awful, and let's get angry at the Russians. And so that stirs up the American public. From that standpoint, this is about more, I think, manipulating American public opinion than it is actually interdicting some great espionage effort.

I mean, the simple fact, let's assume that what he was doing was trying to find out how many tanks the Russians are building. Great. The more of that information that comes out, the better, because the sooner we get that, we'll realize we can't compete with the Russians in building tanks. Precisely. They're built so many that we're not going to be able to catch up. So maybe we'll wake up and realize we need to try to get a negotiated settlement to stop the slaughter in Ukraine. Maybe that might happen, but that's not on the table.

What happens to him now? He goes through a false secret trial. He's sent to some hard labor prison camp where Navalny is. And then eventually there'll be a trade between him and this so-called Brazilian soccer player or somebody else. No, I think it'll be handled a lot like Brittany Grider. It'll be an open trial. And I think you were correct earlier, noting the connection to the Brazilian soccer player, that he probably was grabbed in order to effective trade down the road. But this is, you know, they're not going to send him to the gulag and, you know, strap him in leg irons and make him hammer rocks.

That's not going to happen. All right. You talk about the ability of CIA to affect public opinion. Now my question is a little off the wall, but I'm confident in your brain. In Israel, there were just tremendous demonstrations against the government, so overwhelming that somebody as powerful and self-confident and forceful as Benjamin Netanyahu backed down. CIA involvement? I can't rule that out. I know that at least from Benjamin Netanyahu's side, they're claiming that there was U.S. influence, U.S. intelligence operations to try to promote that kind of opposition to Netanyahu's government.

And let's remember, this is not the first time that the United States would have interfered in the internal affairs of Israel. It was during the Obama administration that they were actively sending money to opposition political parties. So the CIA certainly has contacts there and relationships. And, you know, Israel is not a monolith, just like those kinds of political divisions we see here in the United States. Those exist in Israel, even though it's a very, very small state numerically. Since we last spoke, it appears by Ukrainian silence and Russian boasting that Bakhmut has finally fallen. We know from a map that it's sort of a central location that can almost open the floodgates to more Russian troops going westward when the earth hardens a little bit as spring arrives. Would the CIA have had officers on the ground

so that Langley or the West Wing knew in advance that Bakhmut was going to fall? Stated differently, did Langley CIA headquarters, West Wing White House, have an idea of what support Ukrainians really needed before the roof fell in on them? Well, yes, they knew. I don't think they had any personnel forward there at Bakhmut, but the CIA has liaison officers through the military, what they call the Special Activities Division, which is the paramilitary side of the house, that they've got officers there that are able to at least communicate back to headquarters exactly what they're seeing and what's going on. Whether that gets translated into the reality is a whole different question. I mean, I saw that, you know, 30, 40 years ago in the wars in Central America, where the case officers who were out in the field were actually yelling at us, the analysts, because we were, quote, covering up information.

And when we let them know that we hadn't seen the information, they were shocked. And it turned out it was being withheld by their bosses on their side of the house. So that could be going on right now as well. It is not difficult to see the direction this is headed. 85% of Bakhmut is now under the control of the Russians. They captured the city center, the admin center, and that was very symbolic. They've got the soccer stadium. They've captured the steel factory and they've got there are what they call

fire control where they can shoot artillery rounds at any vehicle that's trying to move along the only escape route out of there and there is that that road is just littered with armored personnel character carriers tanks and other vehicles so it is a genuine slaughter and we finally saw today and written comments by Zelensky that he's starting to recognize that he's going to have to pull people out. And it's a tough decision. Well, they knew this two months ago. hey, you've got to mount that offensive. Where's that counteroffensive? Come on, get those troops out there. Who does that? Could you imagine in World War II, in 1944,

with Churchill and Roosevelt saying, hey, Eisenhower, come on, when do you get that offensive going? Let's get it going now. We kept it quiet. We probably engaged in deception. And yet this current group of clowns that infest NATO and the United States military leadership on top of what's going on in Ukraine, they act like it's a game. And they ignore the human cost, the blood that's being spilled. I mean, it's really sad.

They don't care about human costs. Last area of inquiry, since we spoke last, the NATO-Russian border has been doubled in size by adding Finland to NATO at the height of the Russia-Ukraine war. How insane is that? Yeah. Well, it's like that old Christopher Walken bit on Saturday Night Live, more cowbell. We've got to have more cowbell. And we keep doubling down, doing the dumb thing. And the reason NATO expands is because NATO doesn't have enough troops on its own. So it figures if it keeps adding people, we can get some more troops and capability.

I mean, that's really what's going on. We're not adding these people because, oh, look what a strong alliance we are. In fact, Judge, if you look at what's happening on the international front, I have never seen the unraveling of American influence take place so rapidly. You have now Syria is being brought back into the Arab

League uh Saudi Arabia is facilitating that just just yesterday does the the the head of Saudi I could bless but Joe Biden thinks I don't pay any attention to him you've got uh India and Malaysia said okay yeah we're going to accept payment for oil now in rupees. So the central point of the US dollar is disappearing. You've got China and Brazil making deals on that front. You've got African countries now turning increasingly to Russia. And what are we doing?

We're bringing Finland into NATO. Ooh, that's scary. Unbelievable. Larry Johnson, telling it like you always do. Thank you very much for joining us, my dear friend. Thank you, Judge. Until next week. More as we get it.

Colonel McGregor at 4 o'clock this afternoon, Eastern. Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom.