Jan. 23, 2025 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
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| Hi, everyone. | |
| Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. | |
| Today is Thursday, January 23rd, 2025. | |
| Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, longtime family friend of mine, will be here with us in just a moment. | |
| But first, this. | |
| You've been vaccinated and you parade around in two masks for show. | |
| And Senator Paul, you do not know what you are talking about, quite frankly. | |
| And I want to say that. | |
| Officially. What we're alleging is that gain-of-function research was going on in that lab and NIH funded it. | |
| That is not- Get away from it. | |
| It meets your definition and you are obfuscating the truth. | |
| Until you accept responsibility, we're not going to get anywhere close to trying to prevent another lab leak. | |
| of this dangerous sort of experiment. | |
| You won't admit that it's dangerous, and for that lack of judgment, I think it's time to resolve. | |
| What proof is there that there are significant reinfections with hospitalizations and death from the variants? | |
| None in our country. | |
| Zero. Well, because we don't have a prevalent of a variant yet. | |
| We're having one... | |
| Can I finish? | |
| We're having 117 that's becoming more dominant. | |
| You're making a policy based on conjecture. | |
| You want to get rid of vaccine hesitancy? | |
| Tell them then quit wearing their mask after they get the vaccine. | |
| You want people to get the vaccine? | |
| Give them a reward instead of telling them that the nanny state's going to be there for three more years and you've got to wear a mask forever. | |
| Let me just state for the record that masks are not theater. | |
| Masks are protective. | |
| You have immunity there, theater. | |
| If you already have immunity, you're wearing a mask to give comfort to others. | |
| You're not wearing a mask. | |
| Dr. Fauci, knowing that it is a crime to lie to Congress. | |
| Do you wish to retract your statement of May 11th where you claimed that the NIH never funded gain-of-function research in Wuhan? | |
| Senator Paul, I have never lied before the Congress, and I do not retract that statement. | |
| Do you accept responsibility? | |
| We're not going to get anywhere close to trying to prevent another lab leak of this dangerous sort of experiment. | |
| You won't admit that it's dangerous, and for that lack of judgment, I think it's time that you resign. | |
| You have said that I'm unwilling to take any responsibility for the current pandemic. | |
| I have no responsibility for the current pandemic. | |
| You think your takedown of three prominent epidemiologists was not political? | |
| You don't want me to finish the current pandemic. | |
| Bringing back memories for you, Senator Paul. | |
| Welcome here, my dear friend. | |
| Always a pleasure. | |
| Did Dr. Bassey lie to Congress? | |
| Did he lie? | |
| Of course he lied. | |
| And the lie was, I asked him directly, did the NIH fund gain-of-function research in Wuhan? | |
| And he tried to escape and say, well, you know, it really wasn't gain-of-function. | |
| But we have a private email from him from February 1st of 2020, where he says in private to a group of other virologists and people who are giving advice, he said, well, we're really worried because the virus looks engineered. | |
| And we know that that lab does gain-of-function research, and he described a certain type of research they were doing. | |
| He didn't say it was funded, but we have other evidence that shows that what he was describing was being funded by NIH. | |
| So yes, they were funding research that in private he was saying... | |
| Absolutely it was gain of function. | |
| But then later on, they came before us and they would say, well, sure it's gain of function, but doesn't meet the definition that we wrote into the government rules for gain of function. | |
| They also changed the definition over time. | |
| During one of the appearances, he had changed the definition the day before he appeared in the committee. | |
| So it is obfuscation, it's dissembling, it's disingenuous, but ultimately it was lying. | |
| For the laypeople among us, of whom I am one, what does gain of function mean, Senator Poole? | |
| Typically you're talking about a virus, and a virus that has one of its functions is it causes disease. | |
| So if you have like two coronaviruses, one of them causes disease and... | |
| Maybe it has, you know, one in 10,000 people die. | |
| You mix it with another virus, another coronavirus, and now five people out of 100 die. | |
| So it's this huge gain in lethality. | |
| So it could be that it gains in dangerousness. | |
| And or infectiousness are two ways to gain function. | |
| But it's been a measure of a long time because when you make a virus in the lab that gains function, you've got to be very, very wary because if that leaks out and it's brand new or if it's been through serial passage forced to evolve so it is more contagious to humans, | |
| you may have created something that just leaps out to the public and goes everywhere. | |
| And that's what COVID-19 did. | |
| Did Dr. Fauci's behavior, either by commission or omission, contribute in any way to the prevalence of the pandemic in the United States three years ago? | |
| You're talking not about the actual origins of Wuhan, you're talking about the spread throughout the country? | |
| Yes, although you can... | |
| If you can go to the origins in Wuhan if you wish. | |
| Some people say that if you maintain that it came from animals and not from the lab, that your level of worry is less. | |
| So if you really think it's coming from animals, animal viruses are not very infectious at first. | |
| A good example is the way avian flu right now is. | |
| If avian flu is coming natural... | |
| From chickens or from animals. | |
| You'll get infections in humans, but it doesn't go human to human, so they'll be scattered. | |
| So that's what we have right now. | |
| Three or four avian flu infections. | |
| We've had one death. | |
| But it's not going human to human because it hasn't gotten the ability. | |
| It hasn't mutated such that it'll go human to human. | |
| That was the weird thing. | |
| And so when it first came out... | |
| If you think it's coming from animals, you're not as alarmed because you think it'll take a while and maybe it'll be like the one in 2003 and it'll peter out very soon because it doesn't go human to human. | |
| This one came out and took off and it's probably because it was pre-adapted in a lab. | |
| But then you get to whether mitigation things help or hurt. | |
| Most of these things were also lies. | |
| The idea that a cloth mask works was always a lie. | |
| We had studies for influenza where the Particles of the virus are similar to the particles of coronavirus, and they showed that the cloth mask didn't work it on fast. | |
| People who wore no masks had less infections than people who wore cloth masks. | |
| You know, Senator Paul, people lost their livelihoods because of their refusal to wear a mask, and you are telling us that it is known in the medical profession, and to remind everybody, you're a physician, you're an ophthalmologist. | |
| That the cloth masks are not protective. | |
| And there's even a worse disservice to this. | |
| I'm not saying coronavirus wasn't dangerous. | |
| Let's say you're 75 years old and your spouse has coronavirus and you're not sick yet, but you want to take them food. | |
| And Dr. Fauci says wear a cloth mask. | |
| So you do what Dr. Fauci says. | |
| You wear a cloth mask. | |
| You go in to give them food and guess what? | |
| You're going to get COVID from them because cloth masks don't work. | |
| So he's actually giving you, he's making you do something that's not going to work. | |
| So all the public's mad they have to be wearing it. | |
| But in the one instance where you probably want to wear it, where you have to take care of someone who's sick with COVID, he's telling you to wear the kind of mask that doesn't work at all. | |
| And so, yeah, it was just bad advice. | |
| The whole six foot of distance turned out to be a lie as well. | |
| He's now admitted there was no science behind it. | |
| But why is it dangerous and why did it make it worse? | |
| Because you had all these people, you know, let's say you're 75 years old and you have health problems and you want to know whether to go to church or not. | |
| Well, really, I would never force people not to go to church, but I'd probably give them advice. | |
| You know, maybe not. | |
| Instead, he said, go to church and stay six feet apart from people. | |
| But if you're 75, 80 years old and you have health problems and you sit in a fairly small congregation, 6, 10, 20 feet from people, you can still catch COVID because it is aerosolized moving through the air. | |
| Once again, he told a lie. | |
| He wanted just to make you do something for young people and for people who've already had COVID. | |
| It doesn't matter. | |
| Leave them alone. | |
| They don't need all these stupid restrictions. | |
| The schools didn't need it. | |
| But actually, if you were elderly or if you were someone who had risk factors, you actually probably got the wrong advice that six feet, wear a cloth mask and stay six feet apart doesn't stop the disease. | |
| And so he gave wrong advice on that as well. | |
| The third thing that he really gave bad advice on was acquired immunity. | |
| So he kept telling people they had to wear masks, stay six feet apart, they had to stay away from work, they couldn't do any of the fun things they wanted to do in their life, even though they'd already had COVID. | |
| He wanted to mandate a vaccine on people who already had COVID. | |
| No science to say you should be vaccinated if you've already had the disease. | |
| Why has there been no repercussion for all of this horrific advice which so negatively affected human freedom for so many Americans? | |
| For so long when this was happening during Trump's first presidency. | |
| Well, there turned out to be some pushback. | |
| For example, people who were skeptical of government mandates on vaccines were a very, very small percentage of the political parties or of legislation or of really public discourse. | |
| But finally, it did upset us because we had so many mandates that we actually had a majority of Republicans plus some Democrats vote against the mandate in the military to take the COVID vaccine. | |
| So that was a huge step forward. | |
| We have actually gotten to a better place. | |
| President Trump just announced through one of his executive orders that he's going to reinstate military people with back pay. | |
| So there has been a transformation of the public to be more skeptical of the government now. | |
| Some good, some bad. | |
| But skepticism and dissent and the ability to try to make your own decisions and your medical freedom is a good thing. | |
| So in some ways, yeah, we suffered through all that. | |
| But in some ways, I think... | |
| We didn't become more compliant. | |
| We actually became more resistant to the state. | |
| So I think there's some benefit that came from all this. | |
| You know, when you work for the government and you give bad advice and people suffer and liberty is diminished, it appears you have immunity, no pun intended, from the legal consequences of your behavior. | |
| So he gets off scot-free and millions, Yeah, and whether or not he gets off scot-free, I don't think in history he will. | |
| He's probably not going to prison. | |
| He's been preemptively pardoned by the president now. | |
| But, you know, there is Supreme Court precedent, I think, Burdick from 1915 that says if you accept a pardon, you are accepting a form of guilt. | |
| So really, in a way, he has accepted some guilt and culpability in... | |
| The funding and creation accidentally in all likelihood of this virus. | |
| So I don't think he escapes any kind of repercussions. | |
| Now, I've referred him for criminal referral for lying. | |
| During the Trump administration, in the subsequent Biden administration, they did prosecute Trump administration officials for lying. | |
| So there was a chance he still could be prosecuted in this next administration. | |
| I don't think he will, but I'm still investigating this, and I have a very, very narrow question that I've asked. | |
| In deciding whether or not the research in Wuhan was gain of function and needed extra scrutiny, some committee met. | |
| I want to know what the names of the people on the committee were. | |
| I want to know the deliberations of the committee, what the arguments were, and I want to know why they went around the safety committee. | |
| There was a safety committee established in 2017 to look at dangerous research. | |
| Some form of a committee met. | |
| And went around the safety committee. | |
| Did Anthony Fauci approve of this? | |
| Did Francis Collins approve of this? | |
| What were the deliberations? | |
| I've been asking that for three years and they haven't given me any information. | |
| No paperwork. | |
| One of the other consequences to accepting a pardon is the loss of the Fifth Amendment right to remain silent on the subject matter of what the pardon covers, meaning you should subpoena him again. | |
| And question him again about this safety committee and bypassing it, he'd be forced to answer. | |
| And if he did not answer truthfully, he could be prosecuted for perjury because that would not be the subject of the pardon because it happened after he received the pardon, if you follow me. | |
| Yeah, and one of the good news that I can tell your listeners is that now that I'm in charge of this committee, we've assumed the committee and the rules will change and I will have subpoena power. | |
| We've already issued 14 subpoenas to 14 different agencies. | |
| We're beginning to get information back. | |
| As that information flows in, we're going to interview the people who made the decision to fund this research. | |
| We're going to interview them. | |
| We're going to learn of the arguments. | |
| We're going to see if they voted on this. | |
| And we're going to learn of their connection, whether Anthony Fauci or Francis Collins, over who was in charge of the process, who was the ultimate signator that signed off to say this money should go to China to do unsafe, dangerous research. | |
| We are going to get to the bottom of this, and I can't say yet. | |
| But I will say, if everything points towards Anthony Fauci being that person in charge, he will come back and be made to testify. | |
| Before we go on to another topic, Senator, I know your time is limited. | |
| What is the committee that you now chair, and what is its area of jurisdiction? | |
| It's Homeland Security and Government Accountability. | |
| Originally, before 9-11, it was just government accountability. | |
| It was an investigative body that looked at how money was spent, whether it was spent wisely, wastefully, or illegally, and they did investigations primarily of government. | |
| Lately, it's gotten more towards Homeland Security. | |
| I'm going to bring it back towards its investigative arm, and we still will oversee some of the Homeland Security money and some of their authorities, but we're going to spend a lot of time looking at government. | |
| As we begin to reinvestigate and further look into COVID, we're also going to look into speech. | |
| We think it abhorrent that the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security sent police officers to meet with members of the media to talk about and coerce them to bring down constitutionally protected speech. | |
| Some of this was exposed in the Twitter files. | |
| The other half of those conversations were people in government. | |
| We're going to do a government files investigation. | |
| And in that investigation, we're going to see what they were saying behind the scenes about who they were going to target and what language they were going to diminish or ban. | |
| I hope you can get to the bottom of why the FBI sent agents into Roman Catholic churches where Latin masses were being said and why the FBI hacked into the computers of at least one of the priests so that I know. | |
| Who was saying the mass, an utterly harmless, utterly devout, older academic priest who was hacked by the FBI because he was saying Latin masses in Richmond, Virginia. | |
| You know, these were government agents, so maybe not the brightest people in the world. | |
| Perhaps they didn't understand Latin and they thought nothing nefarious was being said. | |
| Switching gears, I was very, very disappointed to learn That your former colleague in the House, Tulsi Gabbard, who now has been nominated by President Trump to be the Director of National Intelligence, changed her mind on 702 of FISA. | |
| You and I and Thomas Massey and others have railed against this. | |
| I've spoken with her, and I'm trying to take a more temperate approach. | |
| And what I would say is this. | |
| In looking at it, if you ask me, am I for or against the 702 program, which is collection of data, and they have these extraordinary ways to collect almost every bit of data you can imagine, I would say I'm 100% opposed to it. | |
| For Americans or people within the United States. | |
| But if you ask me whether or not we can use 702 to collect all the phone data in Libya or Sudan or some other place that has people who want to harm us, I'm actually not so opposed to using the program that was intended to do foreign surveillance. | |
| Now, when they do that, they collect a lot of data that's interconnected. | |
| Once you start collecting data, everybody You go six or seven hops away to people you've communicated with, all of a sudden the whole world is in your database. | |
| Correct, correct. | |
| The FBI reported that the NSA collected data on 3.4 million Phone calls between foreigners and Americans in 2021, the last year for which there is data. | |
| If you take those 3 million phone calls out 6 hops, that covers all 330 million Americans. | |
| So she and John Ratcliffe will use this authority to capture every keystroke and every mobile device and every phone call made by every American. | |
| Here's my point. | |
| I'm not sure that's exactly what she has said. | |
| She said that she supports the 702 program on foreign intelligence as long as it's consistent with the Fourth Amendment was in her statement. | |
| So many people give lip service to the Fourth Amendment. | |
| It doesn't mean anything. | |
| To me, the Fourth Amendment means that if... | |
| You gotta warrant. | |
| Well... But it also means this. | |
| It means if data was collected without a warrant, which all the 702 data is collected without a warrant. | |
| If Americans appear incidentally in there, it's without a warrant. | |
| So if you obey the Fourth Amendment, and this is what she said in her statement, the Fourth Amendment would say that anything that you collect or anything that you look at on an American out of 702 data can't be used in a court of law. | |
| Now, so there is some question of whether or not her statement was a repudiation or whether her statement was actually... | |
| And I think the other side misunderstands. | |
| We misunderstand each other. | |
| The opposition thinks we want no spying on potential enemies outside the U.S. And so they think because we want restrictions. | |
| Now, some people have wanted a warrant requirement on all of this data and say you can still look at it for Americans. | |
| I will vote for that reform, but I'm actually not for using that data on Americans, period, because it's been collected illegally to begin with. | |
| You have the understanding of the Fourth Amendment of a constitutional scholar. | |
| I know you're an eye surgeon, but you have a tremendous understanding of this. | |
| Senator Paul, I know you have to go. | |
| What a pleasure, my dear friend. | |
| Thank you for your time. | |
| I hope we can do it again. | |
| Thank you. | |
| Sure. There's your book, Deception, the Great... | |
| COVID cover-up by Dr. Senator Rand Paul. | |
| Wow, a great interview. | |
| Coming up later today at 1 o'clock, Kivorko Massey, and at 2 o'clock, Colonel Larry Wilkerson at 3 o'clock, Professor John Mearsheimer at 4 o'clock, Professor Jeffrey Sachs at 4.30, and he has some hot news for us that he just transmitted to me, | |
| Colonel Douglas McGregor. | |
| Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom. |
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