Date: Saturday, 30 August 2025
https://ericzuesse.substack.com/p/larry-c-johnson-ray-mcgovern-jeffrey
https://theduran.com/larry-c-johnson-ray-mcgovern-jeffrey-sachs-patrick
Larry C. Johnson, Ray McGovern, Jeffrey Sachs, Patrick Henningsen, and Chay Bowes, on U.S. Empire Ending
29 August 2025, by Eric Zuesse. (All of my recent articles can be seen here.)
“INTEL Roundtable w/ Johnson & McGovern - Weekly Wrap, 29-August”
Judge Napolitano, 29 August
0:34
Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Friday, August 29th, 2025. It's the end
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of the day, the end of the week, the end of the month. It's our favorite time, the intelligence community roundup with
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my dear friends Ray McGovern and Larry Johnson. Gentlemen, welcome here. Thank you as always for uh the double duty.
0:55
Thanks for accommodating uh my schedule. As usual, we have a lot to talk about.
1:02
Larry, you have written some uh interesting work uh particularly the
1:08
research that you've done on Donald Trump and BRICS. Isn't it ironic that
1:14
with all of his attacks on BRICS, his now uh almost unconscionable
1:20
um tariffs on India, this has uh served to unite and strengthen bricks, has it
1:28
not? It has accelerated its development. JOHNSON: Uh you know, you asked me this
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question a year ago, right? Where will BRICS be a year from now? Uh, and I said, 'Well, you know,
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they're still going to be trying to figure their way out of the forest. They’ve still got a lot of challenges that
1:46
there's not a lot of unity within bricks despite having had a successful summit in the summer of uh 2024.
1:54
But what has happened since Donald Trump came out with his tariff regime and sanctions that it has taken India and
2:02
Brazil in particular, energized them in a way that they were not previously
2:09
engaged, and they are moving in the exact opposite direction. They are defiant.
2:16
You know, Donald Trump, according to the report I heard earlier today from Alexander uh Christoforu,
2:26
Trump has tried to call Modi now five times this week. Modi's not picking up
2:31
the phone. So, you know, anybody that's been in a bad relationship with a boyfriend or girlfriend or a spouse and
2:39
you've done something bad and then you try to call them and talk talk, no, not answering the phone. Same thing
2:46
going on with Trump and Modi. The the energy sector, the uh entrepreneurial
2:51
sector in India, which previously was the one who were the strongest advocates for closer ties with the United States,
2:59
have now completely reversed their position, are calling for sanctions, calling for embargos on US products,
3:07
calling to move away from the United States. We've seen the similar phenomena with Brazil and um you know in the past,
3:16
uh Brazil's benefited greatly from Donald Trump's tariffs because as soon
3:21
as Trump put the tariffs uh on on China, China then said, "Okay, we're not buying
3:26
any more US soybeans uh and we're not buying any more US corn." And they turned to Brazil. They said, "We'll buy
3:33
the soybeans from you." Now, instead of in, you know, in the old days, if Brazil and China were going to make that
3:39
exchange, they'd have to go on to the international financial market, China would have to buy dollars with its
3:46
currency and then they said that dollars to Brazil and Brazil would could change
3:52
those dollars into reales. Not anymore. They're going direct renminbi [yuan] to
3:58
real Chinese currency for for Brazilian currency, which means the US dollar is sitting on the sideline getting no
4:04
action going, "Hey, hey, over here, which is why we're seeing the one of the reasons why the dollar is dropping in
4:12
value
4:13
Ray, why has Trump not been attacked for
14:48
normalizing genocide the way Biden was?
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MCGOVERN: Well, because the media is in the hands of Zionists and the media doesn't tell the American people the truth. There's
15:01
copious evidence of that. New York Times is a prime example. The BBC, people have
15:07
been fired for criticizing Israel. That's the sum and substance of it. Israel has inordinate influence over our
15:14
foreign policy and our media. And you know, I could go back to George Washington, our first president, a
15:20
general, who warned about alliances that don't share the the common interests of
15:27
each nation. Uh he warned about what would happen if one country gave another
15:33
country uh the precedence that the other country sought while your country really
15:39
has no interest. He was talking about France. Okay, France owed us. We owed France big time. France wanted us to get
15:46
involved in their wars against England and Washington and Jefferson and the all the others. They say, "Look, forget
15:52
about it. Let's let's repair our own country here. Let's not get involved in these eternal forever wars as they were
16:00
at that point in Europe." NAPOLITANO: Larry, I think Ray is right. The only
16:05
people that were able without repercussion to criticize Joe were like
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young Muslims in Michigan. Otherwise, the media was kid gloves. And
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where is Trump criticized for genocide? Here, uh, uh, Clayton Morris, Tucker
16:29
Carlson, or alternate media and nowhere else. JOHNSON: Yeah. Well, we saw the greatest
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display of American hypocrisy yesterday with the wall-to-wall media coverage of
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the shooting of those and killing of those two children in Minneapolis. Terrible, an awful tragedy.
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But every single day that is being repeated in Gaza 10-, 20-fold.
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Instead of two children, you're getting 10 children, 20 children, 40 children killed by Israeli gunfire, by Israeli
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bombs, bombs and ammunition that we, the United States, are supplying. So we are
17:14
in fact facilitators and enablers of the genocide.
17:20
——
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YuMxA5sFy14
29 August 2025, Danny Haiphong
Economist and geopolitical analyst Jeffrey Sachs exposes the truth about Trump's peace flop in Ukraine and how it is backfiring on US hegemony worldwide as Russia, China & BRICS chart a new course. Patrick Henningsen and Chay Bowes join for a full update on the latest in geopolitics.
Prof. Jeffrey Sachs is a world renowned economist and analyst, his website is: https://www.jeffsachs.org/
Patrick Henningsen is a journalist & geopolitical analyst, and the founder of http://21stCenturyWire.com and his own substack at https://patrickhenningsen.substack.com
Chay Bowes is an Irish journalist and commentator, his X account is: https://x.com/BowesChay?ref_src=twsrc...
Transcript [highlights from this 98-minute video, selected by Zuesse]
0:00
HAIPHONG: Hi everyone, welcome welcome back to the show with your host Danny Haiphong. As you can see I am joined by worldrenowned
0:06
economist and geopolitical analyst Jeffrey Sachs. PROFESSOR SACHS, it's great to be back with you today.
0:11
Always good to be with you Danny. HAIPHONG: Thank you. Yes. Uh please hit the like button everyone as we get started here. So I
0:18
Wanted to start Professor Sachs with this. Uh the Trump administration has just authorized an arm sale of about
0:25
$825 million worth to Ukraine. This includes 3,000 plus what are called Iran
0:33
missiles with a range actually that could uh go above the ATACMS
0:39
missiles.
1:00
This funding, this keeps the war going and Trump has said he's not funding the war at all. He's just
1:05
selling weapons to NATO. What's going on here? SACHS: Well, Trump and his team are completely
1:13
incompetent. Uh so, uh, first of all ,every day there's a change of view.
1:20
Some days it's threats other days it's a statement about my best
1:27
friend Vladimir.
1:35
The president is unable to form a
1:42
coherent idea of what's happening. He's pushed by multiple pressures. Uh, his own
1:51
promises to end the war. Uh an American public that is sick and tired
1:58
of all of this. Arms contractors that want to sell weapons. Uh the neocons who
2:05
are partly war profiteeers and partly war ideologues, uh the European leaders
2:12
who are in the same camp. They're some combination of war mongers and captives
2:19
of the military-industrial complex. Theirs and ours which are basically the
2:25
same. Uh so Trump does not have the capacity to find a way out of this. This
2:32
is a an administration that is failing on many fronts including uh the
2:38
challenge of making peace. …
3:08
Very sad. It's uh uh very troubling to have such incompetence in the US
3:16
leadership. …
3:44
Messaging from the Trump administration is very chaotic. On the one hand, they say they're not going to allow
3:51
long-range missile strikes into Russia from Ukraine using US weapons. And yet
3:57
this huge promise to Ukraine, whether it is possible or not, in the amount that they say they're going to supply Ukraine
4:04
with these [3,000] missiles, seems to indicate the exact opposite. …
4:59
Nobody really wants the war to stop other than, I would say,
5:06
Russia. Frankly, Russia wants it to stop on terms that it has laid out, which is
5:14
neutrality of Ukraine first and foremost and the territorial concessions after 11
5:23
years of war since the Maidan coup which the US backed in February 2014. [No; It was Obama’s coup, he didn’t ‘back’ it; he planned and executed it.]
6:52
As incompetent as the US leadership is, I
6:57
would absolutely put Starmer Mertz and Macrone in the same level of grotesque
7:05
incompetence. I don't think any of them reflects the interests of their country,
7:11
the security of Europe or a reality of this situation.
44:57: CHAY BOWES [in Moscow]: Russian society now is more cohesive in
48:00
my view on a street level for support for Vladimir Putin than it's ever been in my time here. I see far less
48:07
dissenting voices about Putin. People here seem to have realized that the West's aim via Ukraine was to destroy
48:15
the Russian state, and people realize that. And you don't have to be a supporter of Vladimir Putin. A taxi driver might say, "I just I dislike
48:21
Vladimir Putin." But he's the best man for the job right now because people see he was right. And if a taxi driver in
48:29
Moscow knows now that Vladimir Putin was right, you better bet your bottom dollar, that the policy analysts in
48:34
Washington and Brussels and London know he was right. So, who wants to be the
48:40
person that has to write the press release saying we were utterly, strategically, financially, and
48:45
militarily defeated in Ukraine? Who wants to be that person in the State Department, in Whitehall, or in
48:51
Brussels? I don't think anybody wants to be that person. So, they're kicking the can down
48:56
the road as as Patrick says, trying to escalate. The only hope is that Russia will make a mistake. Russia will blink.
49:04
Something might happen in Russia. Vladimir Putin might actually be one of his 12 uh fake personalities that comes
49:10
out. He might actually be dying like they've said seven or eight times. You know, the Chinese might uh invade Russia.
49:16
PATRICK HENNINGSEN: It makes for good
54:46
politics to say all this stuff like, "Oh, we shouldn't be protecting the uh Europeans." But have you seen the United
54:52
States withdraw from all their bases in Germany? Have you seen any of that? No. What we see what we see is 47 new bases
55:01
in Denmark, Finland, Sweden, and Norway. That's the biggest US military expansion
55:07
uh outside of the Middle East. And so, and that includes the Arctic as well. So
55:12
for the north nor northern passage above the Russian coastline and then down over
55:17
Scandinavia into the North Atlantic that is where and this is what the whole
55:22
Greenland uh sort of you know play that Trump was trying to make was very much attached to that. So while they're
55:29
saying all this stuff like we need you know this isn't our war there. So all the money is getting
55:36
plowed into European defense and and US positions there and huge bases uh
55:42
projects in Romania as well. So they they're militarizing this new uh Iron
55:47
Curtain which they're trying to draw which they've moved closer to Russia. So that's where the money is. So I don't
55:54
see the United States any any announcements about withdrawing from their huge military footprint uh in
56:00
Europe. So that's not happening. Nor removing their nuclear deterrence. So that's not happening either. So what are
56:06
what exactly are we looking at here? And I don't think this is I don't really take any of this rhetoric seriously at
56:13
all until you start seeing action. Trump talks and talks and talks and there's no
56:19
—————
Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.
