CNN Newsroom: https://transcripts.cnn.com/show/cnr/date/2023-06-24/segment/11

Interview

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Wild is right, Jim. Thank you for having me on. I guess Putin's learning. If you can't trust a bloodthirsty mercenary, who in the world can you trust? You know, he -- this guy is like his protege. He gets -- I mean it was reminiscent a little bit of Hitler coming in on mother Russia getting so close to Moscow. And then, of course, I guess they hit his price and he turned around and hightailed it to Belarus.

But, you know, you have to wonder, though, he got so close without any military raising a hand at all, Jim. And so that tells me definitely one or two things, either that they -- the Russians said, in fact, keep away from this guy, or they were afraid to take him on, because if you saw any of the pictures of him in some of the towns, people were getting selfies with him. He was getting the rock star treatment.

So it's very interesting. And I would warn people that are anxious to see Putin dethroned if this guy were to take over. He is a bloodthirsty SOB man. He's another no count. And it's very reminiscent to me during the Second World War, I've studied a little bit of the history there. My father fought in it. My mama flew an airplane, but -- during it. But Hitler, they could have -- Churchill could have taken him out towards the end, but they figured he was doing such a terrible job, why take him out, leave him in there.

And, you know, because we might -- the devil we don't know is what we're worried about. And so there's a lot of moving parts here. I mean, it is a crazy interesting day, though.

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And I caution my colleagues because, you know, military intelligence to me is a whole lot like congressional ethics. I'm not sure if it exists. They predicted even with our incredible investment that in fact, Putin would just roll over Ukraine. You remember the talks? It was in two weeks. They had no idea that the Ukrainian people would rally around Zelenskyy and their country and defend their homelands.

So, you know, it's a tossup anyway. I think it's a whole lot like the weather in Washington with Russia in this case, because everybody just sticks their head out the wind and says, well, yes, in fact, it's raining. And they'll predict rain. And that's pretty much what the intelligence community has been doing on this war.

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Yes. You would think they're weakened, but Prigozhin is apparently, his Wagner group, his mercenaries, the majority of them are heading back or still over there. So, you know, I don't know that it weakens the military. I think morale wise, it sure as heck would. But as you've reported many times, what do the Russian people know and what do their troops know? What are they being told? They don't have the access to the media. They can't turn on cable T.V. and watch CNN like we can and find out what the heck is going on.

So it's kind of a tossup, really. You know, it's a brutal war and it's wearing them down, I suspect. And I don't see monetarily how they can withstand too much more of this just because it's gone on so long. It has to be stretching their finances very thin. And I suspect and that hurts back home. And you saw, you know, when they were rolling in that just -- I thought it was a lackluster at best attempt of the folks trying to stop Prigozhin from coming in and the Wagner group. So who knows?

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I don't. Personally, I still think it's not our war. It's Europe's war. I still think Putin is a dirtbag, and I wish he'd be deposed, and I wish somebody had a bigger heart for Russia and their people and the Ukrainians would take over. But I still think it's a bad idea for us to be in that war. It has shades of Vietnam, and we're just ramping this thing up.

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Absolutely.

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But I don't know that we're going to do that. I think what we're going to do is fatten the war machine, fatten missile stocks, members of Congress, and it just goes down the line. And I've stated this many times, it's not normal for a human being to make a 70 percent return on average. And you have -- and I'm not just talking about former Speaker Pelosi. There's several, and I'm sure they're on both sides of the aisle that will profit from this.

When we send our missile defense system over there, we have a rule to keep ours at a certain level of defense, at a certain level of readiness. And when we don't have them, we have to purchase them. So it's obviously those multibillion dollar contracts go to one or two contractors that we know that we have the only people that have that technology. So it's a pretty safe bet that your investments are going to go up.

I just don't think it's a good idea for us to be this war. You know, let's put it into context. Russia's GDP is somewhere between what, France and Canada. They're not the superpower as they was were, Jim. And I worry too the signals we're sending to China right now.

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No, no, no. But I think we should have looked at economic -- look at the economic and the oil situation first instead of completely capitulating to them. And, you know, you remember the first couple of months of the war, people didn't like it. But in fact, we're funding both sides of that war with oil contracts because we still honored those contracts. And so I feel like we're talking out of both sides of our mouth on this thing, and we should have never had anything to do with it.

We should have provided economic pressure on Russia and gone with that first, gone with our diplomacy first before we led with the bullets. And I'm afraid we kind of got the cart before the horse. That's just my opinion. I'm fiscally reserved on these things. We're $32 trillion in debt, and so 114 billion unrestricted dollars to a country that's fairly corrupt to me is probably not a good investment.

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I think they are always playing chess and we're always playing checkers. You know, my thoughts on that are we've been so compromised they know our moves before we make them. I mean you go from TikTok to the balloon that flew over this country that just absorbed every bit of technology that we had to their infiltration to our colleges and campuses, through our research institutes, buying property around our military installations.

They are multifaceted, their investment in oil rigs so they can monitor our ingress and egress on our eastern and our southern seaboards. They're just everywhere. And so, you know, they're watching us and watching how we react. They're watching mostly our political movement during all this and just seeing what we're doing, because it's just like with the balloon, I don't -- I believe the most they got from that, they got a lot of technology, but they saw how we would react or not react, and they saw our military, how it would not react in our White House. So I think -- again, they're playing the long game.

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A hundred percent, 100 percent. I wish he was on a fast trip to hell right now, Jim. Honestly, he's caused nothing but suffering in this world, and he is a very bad person. And I would never -- I've encouraged my colleagues to be very cautious in that, because I think that sends the wrong message to our enemies, and it sends the wrong message to our friends. He's still a dirt bag, in my opinion, and it'll never change. And thank you, Jim, for having me on, brother.

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