The Bullet Doesn’t Match: Who killed Charlie Kirk? w/ Larry Johnson (Transcript)

military forces in the Persian Gulf. So he’s more outside of that chain of command. His task is to modernize the U.S. Army.

JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Got it. He doesn’t get involved, nor will his successor, in planning, plotting, and directing the day-to-day operations, even though there’s probably 6 or 7 U.S. Army troops on the ground somewhere there. Okay. To Charlie Kirk — why is the federal government involved in the investigation of a murder which is a state crime and took place wholly within one state?

The FBI’s Suspicious Involvement in the Charlie Kirk Case

LARRY JOHNSON: Yeah, this is what’s so odd. It’s not that they are involved now, being asked to look at the ballistics, being asked to provide some of their scientific capabilities to the case. On day one, they were right there involved.

There are reports that there were two FBI agents at the hospital where Charlie Kirk was taken that were interfering with the doctor who was trying to treat Charlie Kirk. Then you’re going to step back and go, “Wait a second, Charlie Kirk was — even though he’s from another state — he’s in Utah. The shooting took place in Utah, and the FBI’s response to it was almost immediate.”

In fact, remember, within a couple of hours, Kash Patel’s tweeting out, “Oh, we got him,” and then, “Oh no, never mind, we got the wrong person.” Why in God’s name was he even involved? Because — forget that Charlie Kirk was a celebrity — Charlie Kirk was not a federal official of any kind. So this should be treated just like any other shooting. Yes, it was horrific. It was seen on television, but it did not cross that line of a federal crime.

And unless you’ve got a federal crime, the FBI isn’t involved. There’s no way around it. And unless the local police, after investigating, say, “Hey, we’ve got some unusual stuff, we need some help from the feds,” they can ask for it then. But that should have come a day or two later. Heavens, Kash Patel was climbing on an airplane to get out there as quickly as possible. So, you know what, that’s the big red flag right there. Why the hell was the FBI on scene that day? What did they know?

JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: So FBI agents in an operating room while surgeons are feverishly trying to save the life of a mortally wounded well-known person. Reminds me of Parkland Hospital in Dallas on November 22nd, 1963. What the hell were they doing in an operating room?

LARRY JOHNSON: Well, they actually — these two — they weren’t in the operating room. They were outside the door of the operating room. The doctor had exited, and when the doctor tried to go back in, they stopped him and weren’t going to let him back in. It was like, “Guys, you’ve got no jurisdiction here, right?”

And yet again, it’s one thing if the FBI has been called in and said, “Hey, listen, this is a complicated investigation, we need some help.” Fine, the FBI can respond to that kind of request. But we’re talking within the hour of him being shot, you’ve got multiple FBI personnel on scene, which candidly suggests they knew something. They knew what was going to happen. It’s that bad.

Ballistics: How Investigators Connect a Bullet to a Weapon

JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Tell us how investigators can connect a bullet to the weapon from which it has been fired.

LARRY JOHNSON: Okay, so I’ll show you this. The claim is that a 30-06 — so this is a 30-06. It’s been drilled out of the gunpowder. I’ve got a rubber primer. So it’s not a live round, but this is the size. And just to put it in perspective, it’s about a little more than a third of the size of an iPhone. So that’s a big bullet.

When that bullet is ejected from the shell casing, the firing sequence is: you get a firing pin that hits the primer, which ignites the gunpowder, and that explosion propels this bullet out down the barrel of a rifle. And that rifle has what are called lands and grooves. If you remember the old 007 poster where you’d be looking at the James Bond gun and you’d see the spiral — yeah, that’s the lands and grooves, that spiral. And what that does is it helps put the spin on the bullet and provide some stability during its flight downrange.

JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: So when the bullet comes out, it’s spinning, right?

LARRY JOHNSON: But those — every rifle has — it’s sort of like fingerprints. They’re unique. You can fire another piece of ammunition through that barrel, have the bullet come out, and then compare them. They’ll have similar striations and different marks on the actual bullet.

And that’s assuming you recover a bullet. The problem we’ve got here is, from what I’ve gathered — I have not read the full actual report or the document that was given to the defense — but apparently it was a bullet fragment, not an intact bullet.

And frankly, if a piece of ammunition this size had been fired at Charlie Kirk, it would have exploded his head. His head would have come off. This carries such force that it would have penetrated through. What we saw didn’t penetrate through. And frankly, even if this was what they call a frangible round — a round designed to break up on impact — still the force that’s generated by this at the feet per second that it travels, there’s something that just doesn’t match up.

Plus, the rifle that was used was a World War I, World War II vintage rifle, and the scope, the optic that was on top of it was, just by seeing it, not an expensive optic. I’ve been fortunate to shoot a rifle with a $5,000 optic, and at 140 yards, you can shoot the middle of a quarter.

The Rifle and the Scope

JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Let me just stop you for a second, Larry. That’s a photograph of the actual rifle that the Utah police recovered at the scene. That’s not a prototype. That’s the actual rifle. Can you tell how proficient the scope is just from looking at the photograph of it?

LARRY JOHNSON: Yeah, that’s not a high-dollar scope. It’s adequate, but at 140 yards, it’s just not going to give you that kind of accuracy that you’d think.

But the other problem we’ve got here is when you put a scope on top of a rifle, it doesn’t automatically zero. In other words, where the crosshairs line up — you have to go through a process that’s called zeroing the gun. You’ll fire a shot at a target that has markings so you can tell if you’re right or left, high or low. And on that scope, there are adjustments. There’s an adjustment for what they call windage, which means it can move that reticle back and forth, side to side, and an adjustment that moves the reticle up and down.

I just said there’s no way in hell that that rifle was used to kill Charlie Kirk. But that’s the FBI story that’s being put out there. And I come back to — why the hell is the FBI involved? They shouldn’t be involved.

The ATF Cannot Match the Bullet to the Gun

JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: What did we learn this week that prompted you and me to give up a portion of our Saturday morning to discuss this?

LARRY JOHNSON: Well, the defense was finally given some information in the course of discovery, and it turns out the ATF, who’s quite competent at this, could not match the bullet. And again, I’ll put that up there so people can see it. They couldn’t match the bullet to the gun.

Oh, that’s pretty big. That’s a big deal because how do you know he even fired that? I mean, there are other things to point to that raise serious doubts that he could have even fired the shot.

JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: All right, so the striations on the bullet did not match the striations on the inside of the gun — the bullet that the doctors retrieved from Charlie’s body and handed to the FBI, or the FBI physically took from the doctors, right?

The Tactical Questions: Reconnaissance and the Shooter’s Knowledge

LARRY JOHNSON: So what they do, they’ll take another round, hopefully from his same ammunition that he was using. They’ll fire that into like a sand or water tank and then recover it so they can say, okay, we’ve got this, and then should be able to match it up. And they said it didn’t match. So right off the bat, you’ve got, for the defense, there’s some major reasonable doubt.

But the other issue is more tactical. This kid Tyler Robinson reportedly never attended this school. Had never been there before. Now, maybe that’s not true, maybe they kept back evidence to the contrary, but if that is true, how did he know where to go to line up the shot? How did he know he was going to be shooting at 140 yards as opposed to 180 or 100? The distance that you’re shooting from when you zero your rifle lets you know where you need to aim in order to hit the target.

And then how did he know how to get into this building? Normally, professionals who are set out to assassinate somebody, they do something called reconnaissance. The reconnaissance is you go, you want to make sure — how do I get into an area? What are the obstacles or risks of me being detected? What is sort of the normal? How do I look normal so that I’m not going to stand out? How do I get access? How do I get away? What’s the escape route? What’s the planning?

You don’t just wake up one morning and go, “God, that Charlie Kirk has said some mean things about my boyfriend and I’m going to go kill him.” And then you drive off to a school you’ve never been to before and you find the exact site where you need to be. And then you get up there and hang out for how long? We have no clue about how long he was in place on that roof.

Did Tyler Robinson Fire the Weapon?

JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Did Tyler Robinson fire a weapon at Charlie Kirk on that day?

LARRY JOHNSON: We don’t know. They did not do any tests — the test to find out if there was gunpowder residue on his hands or on his cheek, because again, if you’re firing a rifle, you got a cheek weld that’ll be down on the stock of the gun. Apparently that wasn’t done despite the FBI being on scene, which again raises questions about the local police department’s competence. This is not the kind of thing that they routinely deal with. I don’t think it’s a high homicide area there.

But again, they didn’t immediately pick the phone up and call the FBI and say, “Help.” The FBI was there, and I’m not saying that the FBI pulled the trigger, but I am saying that the FBI clearly had information that something like this was going to take place, and they had personnel in place to respond. That’s what’s so worrisome about it.

And I think the work that Candace Owens has done on this has been remarkable, and she’s come under a lot of attack simply for asking some basic questions. And the answers that keep coming back from people directly involved with Turning Point USA are not satisfactory.

The Bullet That Doesn’t Add Up

JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: In your opinion, did Tyler Robinson kill Charlie Kirk?

LARRY JOHNSON: No, I don’t think so. Taking that shot at 140 yards with that rifle, and then supposedly being able to disassemble it — the whole story just doesn’t add up.

Plus, the other thing that came out in the report was there were 7 different fingerprints and DNA recovered on that rifle. So just to say, did Tyler Robinson have access to this rifle? Well, yes. Do we have evidence that he fired it that day? No, we don’t. That’s just the story we were told, and you’re expected to buy it.

But then again, when you say, “Okay, well, let’s at least match up the bullet” — except the rifle they’re claiming was used, anybody can go into YouTube, there are video after video after video of different gun enthusiasts trying to replicate that kind of shot. And this bullet, when it’s fired from that rifle at that distance, it should have completely blown out the back of Charlie Kirk’s neck. The force would have been so great — I don’t mean to be so graphic on it, but people need to understand the kind of violence. It would have completely destroyed so much of his neck.

And the notion that this kind of bullet is going to fragment on impact on a soft neck — give me a break. That doesn’t make sense either. So there was some kind of special ammunition used here. Now, there are some—

Foreign Involvement: Netanyahu’s Denial and Joe Kent’s Blocked Investigation

JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Go ahead. No, there’s another area that I want to examine briefly with you, and that is the potential for foreign involvement. And there are two undisputable facts here, and you can connect them however you want, or you can tell me there’s no connection.

One is that within an hour or two of Charlie’s murder, Prime Minister Netanyahu went on international television to deny that the Israelis, the IDF, the Mossad, had anything to do with it. A bit odd. No other head of state did that.

The other is — you connect them however you see fit — the now-resigned but highly respected Joe Kent, the at-the-time Director of Counterterrorism of the Office of the Director of Intelligence, sought forensic records and the FBI refused to give it to him. His job, and that of his team — and his team consists of a lot of ex-FBI agents — is to find out if there was any foreign involvement, and the FBI wouldn’t let him anywhere near it. Can you connect any dots or explain either of those phenomena?

LARRY JOHNSON: Let’s deal with just the facts, what we know to be a fact from multiple sources, and the sources include Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, Candace Owens. Candace was a very close friend of Charlie Kirk.

In the months preceding Charlie Kirk’s murder, he had decided to separate TPUSA from its unencumbered support of Israel. Charlie had played a critical role during the 12-day war of trying to get President Trump not to do it and to back off.

It is a fact that 2 or 3 days before Charlie Kirk was murdered, there had been a meeting on Long Island with some prominent Zionists, a Zionist billionaire, and other members, including a gentleman named Josh Hammer, who had actually debated Dave Smith in July in Tampa with Charlie Kirk hosting the debate. And Dave Smith is a well-known comedian. He’s Jewish, but he’s a very strong opponent of the Zionist cause and how the government of Bibi Netanyahu has treated the Palestinians.

Let’s put it this way — Charlie had made a decision that he was not going to accept any more money. Reportedly, a significant sum of money was offered to TPUSA if they would become basically a mouthpiece for the Zionist cause, and he said, “No, we’re not having any of that.”

I think he was deliberately killed. I think that had something to do with it. That’s my opinion. But what’s so striking is instead of investigating that angle and shutting it down and saying, “No, there’s nothing here,” you get just the opposite. As Joe Kent said, he was blocked by Kash Patel. And again, Kash Patel’s got no federal role in this. This was not a federal crime, but Kash Patel running that kind of interference raises real serious questions about what he knew and when he knew it.

Joe Kent’s Willingness to Testify

JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Wow. When defense counsel for Charlie Kirk calls me and asks for your contact information, may I give it to them?

LARRY JOHNSON: Oh, sure, sure.

JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: I say that only partly in a sense of humor, because when he was on with our friend Tucker Carlson, Joe Kent said he would testify as a witness for the defense about the bizarre goings-on of the FBI, which you just mentioned, and the wall that the FBI built preventing him — who had a legal right to view that evidence — a wall preventing him from acquiring a view of that evidence.

LARRY JOHNSON: Yeah, that’s just — I can’t emphasize enough that there are murders carried out every day in the United States, and the FBI doesn’t get to run around and get involved, even if it’s somebody who’s a celebrity. But in this case, the FBI was there on the ground that day. And why? Why were they there? That is an unanswered question and one that needs to be answered.

Closing Remarks

JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Larry Johnson, thank you very much, my dear friend. I thought of you immediately — I forget when it was now, maybe Thursday morning — when the defense revealed what the government’s ATF experts had told it. A happy Easter to you, and we’ll look forward to seeing you on Monday as usual. Thank you, Larry.

LARRY JOHNSON: Same to you, my friend.

JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Thank you. Thank you for watching this special edition of Judging Freedom. We’ll see you on Monday morning. Happy Easter. Happy Passover. Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom.

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