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Jan. 13, 2025 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
27:20
LtCOL Karen Kwiatkowski : Can Trump Learn?
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Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
Today is Tuesday, January 14th, 2025.
Lieutenant Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski joins us now.
Colonel Kwiatkowski, always a pleasure and deeply appreciated.
As we speak, two events are going on.
One is the confirmation hearings of my friend and former Fox colleague Pete Hegseth to be.
Secretary of Defense of the United States.
And the other is apparently the final touches on whatever agreement is likely to come about between Hamas and the Israelis.
I'll start with the latter.
Haaretz, an Israeli newspaper of great repute, which I know you and I look at, reports that if this agreement That is being finalized comes to pass.
It's the same agreement that Prime Minister Netanyahu has repeatedly rejected.
Why did he change his mind?
Well, because the president-elect sent an emissary out there who basically said, this is the best you're going to get.
You better take it, or there'll be consequences in the new administration.
If this is true, and Israeli hostages are returned, And Palestinian hostages are returned because of the intrusion into this by a man not yet in office, but of sounder mind and courage than his immediate predecessor.
This would be truly remarkable, wouldn't it?
It really would be.
It speaks to the impact that the Trump election has had, even since the day after.
He's been...
Acting as president in many ways.
And the vacuum has been created for him because Biden is not acting as president.
So, you know, he's taken advantage of this operational space and he's making things happen.
I think that they can't predict Trump.
I think, you know, we have all these ideas.
Everybody, it's like the blind man describing the elephant, you know.
We don't really know how Trump will go.
And I don't think world leaders truly know.
And I think Netanyahu...
I don't think he has this confidence with Trump that he can just bully him.
I mean, Trump himself can be somewhat of a bully.
So, you know, it's interesting to see how they're responding.
I think they're worried.
You know, the Haaretz piece really was remarkable.
It recounts that Mr. Whitcoff, the billionaire real estate developer from here in New York City, whom...
Trump, designated as his Middle Eastern envoy, called up Prime Minister Netanyahu's aides on a Saturday morning and said, I'm leaving Doha and I'm coming to Jerusalem and I need to see the Prime Minister.
And the aide said, well, sorry, it's the Sabbath.
He doesn't see anybody.
We don't know exactly what Witkoff said in response, but we know that Netanyahu saw him about two or three hours.
Later. I got to tell you, I was a little critical of the appointment of Mr. Witkoff figuring, what does a real estate developer know about Middle East politics?
This guy does.
I mean, I know he can be a little bit of a bully like Trump can be, but maybe that's the only medicine that Netanyahu understands.
Yeah, I think that's pretty obvious.
Yeah, Netanyahu is obsessed with himself and his power and exercising that power.
And he interprets how powerful he is.
Based on how much he can push people around.
And I think, you know, while all the various parties in Israel are united against their enemies, you know, they're happy with the five-front war.
If it could be six, they'd probably support that.
But this idea that your strength is in, you know, exercise through hostility, through destruction, this is an idea that I think Netanyahu embraces and others in his government as well.
New York real estate people, they get that.
They get that very well.
An average American, I grew up in North Carolina.
I live in Western Virginia.
I have no idea about throwing your weight around to get what you want and intimidating people.
This is not something that most people do around here.
Really, most people don't do that in the whole country.
In New York City, it's a different breed.
So it may be useful for American interests if Trump continues to adhere to or believe in an America first policy.
Right, right.
If he doesn't, it's not going to help anybody.
But if he puts America first and pushes some of these folks around and gets them back in their box, that would be a good thing.
You know, some of this may have been instigated by our friend and colleague, Professor Jeffrey Sachs.
Who, about three months ago, in a quick trip to the Cambridge Student Union, gave a 90-minute talk about the problems in the Middle East.
And in that talk, he was harshly, harshly critical of Prime Minister Netanyahu.
President Trump took a two-and-a-half-minute clip of the harsh criticism of Netanyahu by Jeff Sachs and posted it on Truth Social, his own venue.
That, of course, went viral around the world and obviously was seen by Netanyahu's people, one of whom was dispatched to the Sunday shows to attack Jeff Sachs.
But this may very well have said, hey, Bibi, you're not dealing with old Joe anymore.
There's a new sheriff in town.
And this is the best deal you're going to get in.
Well, we'll see if he now accepts a deal he repeatedly rejected.
There will be consequences to him, one of which may very well be he'll be Mr. Netanyahu rather than prime minister.
Or inmate.
If Smotrich and Ben Javier leave the government, then he loses his majority in the Knesset and they have to have an election while he's on trial for bribery.
Yeah, I mean, this is how power moves are made.
You know, Trump is not ignorant of any of that, of course.
In fact, I think he and his allies have a great deal of insight into how Israeli politics work.
So, you know, he gets it.
It's good.
It's a good move.
Let me ask you a few questions about Pete Hegseth.
Should female soldiers be involved in combat?
Colonel Kwiatkowski.
You know, I don't understand.
This is where I go to.
I say, well, if they can physically meet or exceed every single standard, not the reduced standards that we have today, but the kind of original standards, maybe 30 years ago, for things like special forces or combat operations,
then I think, well, okay, as a female, I got to stand up for the women.
Okay, if they can do that.
But that's not how it works.
What has happened, of course, and we all know this, there's been affirmative action for females in the military.
I've benefited from it.
Many others have.
They have reduced and modified standards.
We always had reduced standards, even when...
I don't know, 30, 40 years ago.
We didn't have to run the mile and a half in the Air Force as fast as the men.
You know, we've always had female standards.
But when they started reducing combat-type standards, then you have a problem.
And this does even extend to flying fighter jets and the ability to handle Gs or the various things that a musculature, more dense muscles, heavier bone structure, these kinds of things that are Innate to men,
they give an advantage.
And if you are a military, if you're a government that has a military, and you expect to use that military to defend your country in an organized method of war, then I don't see a real place for women in combat.
That's me personally.
Now, but I will say this, and we know this from our Civil War, we know this from any other conflict this country has had in our history, and may in the future have.
Women have a place in war.
They always have.
They always will.
We're very good at a great many things that support a war effort.
In fact, we're better than men in many ways in the things that are needed and necessary to overcome an enemy of any kind.
I don't care if it's an economic enemy, a robot enemy, a military marching on your soil.
It doesn't matter.
Women are very, very useful.
We have a role.
But to act like we can do what men can do is ignorant.
It is self-harm, which I don't think is something that any country wants to do.
So the opinion that you just expressed, with which I fully agree, is the opinion that Pete Hegseth had before he was the nominee.
I know that he is the nominee.
He's doing everything that he can to satisfy.
The same is the case, and this really infuriated me.
I just learned this last night, and I just wrote my column about it, which comes out Thursday morning, for Tulsi Gabbard, whose positions on surveillance and the Fourth Amendment I admired.
Deeply in her years in Congress, she argued against and voted against the extensions of FISA, and particularly Section 702, until two days ago.
She's now done a 180-degree flip, and she's in favor of warrantless spying on Americans.
This really, really manifests an antipathy to first principles in favor of a job that...
She covets.
It just turned my stomach when I saw this.
Yeah, it doesn't seem very brave of her to do that because the American people who elect the Congress, I know that we don't control our congressmen, but we do elect them.
We have a voice.
We have an opinion.
The American people don't like unwarrantless surveillance.
They don't like that.
They don't think the government has the power to do that to the extent that they understand the...
The Fourth and Fifth Amendments, they support them.
And these rules advantage government.
And we just had an election that said, we don't wish to advantage government.
We would prefer to advantage the people.
So we're going to go with the guy who says he's going to put our interests first.
She was on board with that.
She's a key leader in that.
Very popular in all those ways.
So for her to cast that aside, In order to get confirmed, it indicates that the Democrats and many Republicans still hate the people.
It's basically Republicans who hate the Fourth Amendment.
She was told that she wouldn't have enough Republicans if she didn't cave in.
That is a sign of the sickness in the Republican Party that Trump is a part of.
Exposing, because he's not really a Republican in the sense of the last 40 years of that party.
So, you know, he is combating not just the normal left-right politics, he is combating his own party.
So unless they have something they're going to pull out of their hat or their sleeve once he takes office in dealing with the violations of the Constitution that we see in that particular legislation.
Unless they're going to try to change that from another direction and she's going along with this so she can assist in that later effort.
And that requires a huge leap of faith.
If she's not going to do that, if she's sold out, then again, it puts the message to regular people in this country who would like to see a constitutional government that it's going to be up to us to enforce that.
We are going to have to counteract these statist and...
Let me get back to Pete Hegseth.
I don't remember the woman's name.
A U.S. Senator from Hawaii asked him the following.
President Trump in his first term ordered Defense Secretary Esper.
To have troops fire on Americans who were demonstrating outside the Capitol building and to aim their shots below the knees, and Secretary Esper refused to do so, and a few days later, he resigned.
Would you have complied with such an order?
To my disappointment, no, I'm telling you, I'll ask you what you would do in a minute, but to my disappointment, Pete did not reply.
Now, he knows, we all know, it is unlawful to obey an unlawful order.
And we also know it is unlawful to shoot, no matter who you are, military or police, at demonstrators who do not pose a deadly threat.
Take it from there.
Well, you know, unlawful order for sure.
He could have gone with that.
He could have brought up...
A past situation, you know, Kent State before his time, but still, we have done this before, to great negative impact on everything.
Very wrong, proven to be wrong.
But the other thing is, even police don't do that.
You know, even cops will go with non-lethal.
You know, they'll shoot tear gas at you, but they won't.
And if they do make a mistake and shoot a live bullet instead of a, you know, something that's non-deadly, the police are punished for that.
It's not acceptable.
It's also illegal, or at least I thought it was, with posse comitatus rulings that we've had.
I thought it was illegal for the military to act in a policing capacity.
It is.
He could have answered with any of those things, and still not answered.
He could have just gave the context, and I'm pretty sure he probably knows it, but maybe he didn't expect that question.
The questioner was Senator Hirono, H-I-R-O-N-O, Senator Mazie Hirono, whose name I forgot, but whose image I remember from other congressional hearings.
Should Donald Trump sell the post office?
Now, the listeners may think that I'm just asking this question out of the blue, but...
You wrote about this recently at Judge Knapp and elsewhere.
So, I mean, who would buy something that loses $6 billion a year?
That's right.
Nobody would.
Maybe a donor.
Maybe one of Trump's big donors would do it.
But, yeah, absolutely.
The post office has long passed its ability to justify any tax dollars.
There's no doubt about it.
They run routinely billion-dollar...
They get bailed out periodically by the Congress, and they still provide lousy service.
And I live in a rural area, and I have nothing against our local carriers.
You know, they're great people.
But, you know, I get way better service on the odd Amazon purchase that I make than I ever do with the postal service.
In fact, we had a little bit of snow.
Roads were a little bit icy.
They were scraped.
But they didn't deliver mail all of last week.
I think the first mail we got was a huge pile of mail on Saturday.
So five days they didn't.
So the whole snow and sleet and rain, whatever they used to say about the post office, they don't do that.
And Amazon came.
Oh, Amazon drove down.
One Amazon guy, I ordered something very small.
I forget what it was.
He drove all the way down the driveway before it was even...
Scraped or anything.
So I was surprised that he did that.
Probably thought it would be a fun thing to try.
Back in the 1840s, so we're now a generation before the Civil War, a libertarian hero, a guy who has come down to history as a libertarian hero, named Lysander Spooner, competed with the post office for delivery between Boston,
New York, Philadelphia, and Washington.
And he actually delivered faster and for less money than the post office.
And what did the Congress do?
Made it a crime to compete with the post office for first class mail.
You can only compete with the post office for packages.
Why don't they just repeal that statute?
And if Jeff Bezos and his people want to compete with the post office for first class mail, who would use the post office when we know that Amazon is so reliable?
Yeah, no, and it's also, it's not just that Amazon is reliable per se, but a free market enterprise, and Amazon is that, and so UPS, all these delivery services and packages have developed their techniques and skills and adapted technology and taken risks and provided what customers want at a cost customers are happy to pay.
The post office has done none of that, okay?
I don't care how many upgrades they have.
In fact, a lot of people I know will not send letters anymore.
I mean, they're actively seeking ways to avoid using a 75-cent stamp or 74 cents.
I'm reading a fascinating novel by Robert Harris, the great British historical novelist called Precipice, and it's about the entry of Great Britain into World War I and the fixation that the Prime Minister has on a young lady young enough to be his daughter.
And how do they communicate?
They each write three letters a day, and the post office delivers them.
In London, at the turn of the last century, the post office made 12 deliveries a day.
My God, are we in a different world now?
All right, I'm going to switch gears and return to Pete Hegseth.
Chris has a great clip.
This is really Tweedledee and Tweedledum.
I'm a Christian.
I'm a Zionist.
The Jewish people deserve a homeland in the ancient holy land where they've lived since the dawn of history.
Do you consider yourself a Christian Zionist?
Senator, I support...
I am a Christian, and I robustly support the state of Israel and its existential defense and the way America comes alongside them as their great ally.
Thank you.
Because another protester, and I think this one was a member of Code Pink, which, by the way, is a Chinese communist front group these days.
Senator, I do.
I support Israel destroying and killing every last member of Hamas.
In Iraq and Afghanistan?
Senator, I do not.
I think our troops, as you know, as so many in this committee know, did the best they could with what they had.
We're not...
The outcomes, and tragically, the outcome we saw in Afghanistan under the Biden administration put a stain on that, but it doesn't put a stain on what those men and women did in uniform, as you know full well, Senator.
Thank you, Mr. Exeter.
Now, I don't know if this attitude is consistent with the Steve...
Wyckoff or Wyckoff attitude, take it or leave it, Bibi.
I just don't know.
He may be testifying for an audience of one, and that's the person who's about to nominate him, or he may be testifying in order to swage the other concerns that certain senators have about him.
He knows darn well what a Christian Zionist is, and he knows how dangerous that is to human freedom.
Yeah. Yeah, I think it's the way that they establish these definitions and make these statements sort of, you know, setting a stage of fantasy.
And can you confirm this?
And the guy is happy to do it.
It's disappointing to see Hedgepeth not really take a strategic or historical look at any of this stuff.
Because when he's asked about Iraq and Afghanistan, you know, we, I mean, That's something near and dear to, I think, a lot of people's hearts my age.
And, you know, if you study it and you look at what it tells us about our government, about our empire, about how we make decisions, what motivates those decisions, and of course, how we conduct ourselves in these various wars of choice and wars of empire.
For him to gloss over that, well, we had a bad withdrawal from Afghanistan, that was Biden's fault, and that really made us look bad, that is extremely shallow, okay?
That is almost so shallow, you know, I would be even happier if he had just made a joke, you know, about something.
You know, I can't applaud at all the way the troops left, the hurried way in which they left, and the damage that was caused.
But it was the Trump administration that negotiated with the Taliban and which picked a date into the future for their release of 5,000 fighters from a prison.
Mike Pompeo did not negotiate with the government of Afghanistan.
He negotiated with the Taliban.
And, of course, the date they picked for the release was a date that they thought would be during Trump's second term, and it turned out to be during Biden's.
Before we go...
I want to play a clip of Professor Sachs from earlier today.
I think you'll appreciate watching and listening to this, Karen.
If there is a deal, this is Donald Trump's accomplishment.
Joe Biden, I'm sorry to say, for years has just gone along with what other countries have told the U.S. to do.
And this ceasefire should have happened a long time ago.
If it comes, and it should come, it is coming through pressure that should have been applied a long time ago.
This is a basic point.
We've been discussing it not only about the war in the Middle East, but also the war in Ukraine.
He's right.
He's talking about the pressure that Trump, not yet the president, through Mr. Whitcoff, not yet in any official position, put on Prime Minister Netanyahu.
Now, they haven't agreed to anything yet.
All we have are reports and leaks.
The agreement is there.
They're putting the final touches on it.
It's what Bibi rejected three or four times.
We'll see what happens.
We'll see what comes out.
Professor Sachs was saying right before that clip was, expect Biden to take credit, expect Trump to take credit.
But none of this would have happened without Trump.
No, not at all, not at all.
He has expanded or opened up the Overton window of possibilities, of what is possible to think.
And some of that is, you know, very shocking.
Like, we're going to take Canada and Greenland.
These are very...
For the most people, odd ideas.
But he's allowed us to now debate and talk about things like that.
Talk about empire.
Talk about what it means to put America first.
We haven't talked about that.
We're talking about it now.
And he's also talking about the Middle East almost as a kindergarten filled with a bunch of people that are continually causing problems more and more.
You know, he wants to stop that.
I know Trump is comfortable when he doesn't have to worry.
He puts out fires.
He wants to put these fires out so he can do what he really wants to do, what really gives him, you know, the sense of who he is.
And I don't think Israel is number one on his, you know, making Israel a greater Israel.
I don't think that is on his list.
And I hope it's not on his list.
And so, you know, we don't know anything, really.
We don't know what's in his head and what he's doing.
But, you know, I'll take the small gains.
Karen Kwiatkowski, thank you, my dear friend.
We were all across the board, but a very comfortable and amiable conversation.
Much appreciated by the audience, I know.
I hope we can see you again next week.
Absolutely. Thank you, Judge.
Thank you.
Coming up tomorrow...
At eight o'clock in the morning, Professor Gilbert Doctorow.
At noon, Aaron Maté.
And at three, Phil Giraldi.
And on Thursday, a full day rounding out all of your favorites, ending with Colonel Douglas MacGregor.
Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom.
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