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Jan. 23, 2025 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
24:06
COL. Douglas Macgregor : The Coming World War III
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Hi, everyone.
Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
Today is Thursday, January 23rd, 2025.
Colonel Douglas McGregor joins us now.
Colonel McGregor, thank you very much for accommodating my schedule.
Thank you for your time with us.
I have so many questions I want to ask you, but here's the one that's boring in on me, particularly in light of emails that you and I have privately been exchanging.
Do we know if the Trump administration Has terminated aid?
Has shut the spigot to Ukraine?
No, he hasn't terminated the aid, but I think President Trump has directed that all military aid halt while there is a complete audit and investigation.
This is to look into the complete disappearance of vast stores of equipment and money.
So I think rather than trying to terminate it outright, he's simply stopped it.
So that at this point, in all of the various storage areas left in Poland, Lithuania, Romania, up and down the borders, nothing is moving across the border into Ukraine for the time being.
And that's not necessarily linked to the 90-day freeze of foreign aid.
That could last much longer as they try to investigate this disaster.
Colonel, how long can Ukraine last?
If U.S. armaments and munitions and cash, and you didn't mention cash, so don't let me put words in your mouth, have stopped flowing.
Well, I don't know about the cash, and you're right.
That's a big issue because that helps to sustain the graft and corruption that keeps the Ukrainian government operating, and for that matter, the Ukrainian army.
Right. There's also some evidence, and I'm not sure where it came from.
It was just reported to me.
And I've asked some people to track it down that Zelensky and Putin are supposedly prepared to talk to each other.
Perhaps that too has something to do with pressure from President Trump on President Zelensky.
I think what we're witnessing right now, frankly, is that President Trump, instead of making a frontal attack on the sacred cow of Ukrainian aid, is finding a way to make a flank attack.
Find a way to stop it, disrupt it, halt it in favor of audit and investigation without outright stopping it.
That probably will avoid an immediate confrontation with the Hill.
And he's fired all of the key people involved in Ukraine, military aid in the Department of Defense, which is another good move.
Now, where they're headed, what's going to be done with them, that's another matter.
I have no idea.
But I think he's creeping forward to the point that you and I have discussed in the past, which is step number one before you do anything else is to stop the aid.
You want the killing to stop?
Stop the aid.
And I think he's doing it.
Well, if the aid stopped, it wasn't the military collapse.
And when the military collapses, the Russians will have achieved, I would think, their goals.
I think their goal is not yet achieved until you have completely neutralized Ukraine, denazified it, disarmed it.
They've got a ways to go before that happens.
But I don't think it's unreasonable to begin looking for high-end Mercedes, Porsches, and other automobiles of that nature moving at high speed from KIF all the way to the Polish border and beyond, packed probably with as much cash as they can carry.
Wow. There can be no amicable resolution of this without an utter rejection of NATO's presence on Ukrainian soil forever.
That's right.
You're spot on.
I think President Trump understands that.
He said that.
It looks like Ukraine's going to be neutral.
Gosh, who'd have thought?
He's gotten that message.
The bad news here, Judge, and I'm sure you're going to come to this, Is that people keep handing him talking points from General Milley and Secretary Blinken with utterly false and misleading information in terms of numbers of casualties and so forth.
Someone is feeding him a lot of nonsense about Russia as this stricken state that needs help, is economically wounded, whose military can't find salt.
Crap. He needs to start demanding the truth.
That's why it's more important than ever to get somebody like Tulsi Gabbard into that DNI, because Tulsi, if nothing else, will demand the truth.
I don't know what Radcliffe will do, but I know that Tulsi absolutely will demand the truth.
President Trump made the statement that the Russians have lost a million troops.
I'm sure you're going to say that's absurd, and I have no idea where he got it from.
And then he insulted President Putin, saying Putin's ruining Russia, also contrary to the truth.
Then he said if President Putin doesn't sit down and negotiate meaningfully with President Zelensky, he's going to ratchet up the American sanctions on Russia, which brought laughter in the Kremlin, because the only thing they sell us now is something we need.
Which is uranium for power plants.
I don't know if he knows what he's talking about.
Well, see, this is the problem.
I think President Trump tends to still see the world the way it was when he left office, Judge, and it's not the same world.
The amount of damage and destruction wrought by the Biden administration over the last four years, not just in Eastern Europe and Ukraine and with Russia, also in the Middle East.
It is beyond evaluation at this point.
We can only begin to guess.
But we do know the numbers that he was using are wrong.
I think Scott Ritter spoke yesterday.
Someone handed me a transcript of his statements.
His numbers pretty much track with what I have been told.
He says 700,000 Ukrainian soldiers are dead.
That's certainly reasonable.
I knew that at least 600,000 to 650,000 were dead.
But given the horrific losses of the last several weeks and months, while the Ukrainian army was retreating and collapsing, they had another mass surrender today, thank God.
So at least those people will stay alive and not be killed.
It's quite reasonable.
On the Russian side, I've always felt about 90 to 100,000 is correct.
And the Ministry of Defense...
Ritter agrees with you on that number, Colonel.
Yeah. And now then when it comes to...
Wounded, that's very tough, but if we stay with the one to seven, in other words, that for every one Russian or Russian soldier or affiliated soldier killed, seven Ukrainians have died, then you end up with about 300,000
to 400,000 wounded on the Russian side, with the exception that the Russians have done an excellent job of saving people's lives on the battlefield, and Ukraine has not done that.
So we assume that perhaps 60 to 70% of the Russians who have been wounded have been returned to duty.
We have evidence for that.
The tragedy in Ukraine is we don't have any idea how many wounded there are.
I don't know if you remember, but I think this was a year, year and a half ago, I had received a phone call from someone standing in a hospital in Ukraine.
My friend, who was in Europe, in other words, Eastern Europe, but not in Ukraine, put his phone up against it so that I could hear what he was saying, and he told me that the hospital was full of severely wounded and dead people lying in the hallways and everything else,
and then told me that in order to be evacuated, increasingly, you had to pay the ambulance driver to take you to a hospital.
Yeah, I do remember you telling me that.
I think this tragedy is now...
Coming to fore what President Trump must demand.
He must demand the truth.
He must stop believing what people have been saying.
It's false.
And he's got to do that before he presses forward with any arrangement that might be made with Russia.
Because otherwise, he looks ridiculous.
The Russians certainly know the truth, and so do the Ukrainians.
And for that matter, people in Europe are beginning to figure it out.
Here he is two days ago.
More dead than you could know.
Cut number 13. President Zelensky would like to have peace.
He's told me that very strongly.
He'd like to have peace.
But it takes two to tango.
We'll see what happens.
Anytime they want, I'll meet.
I'd like to see that end.
Millions of people are being killed.
And they're being killed.
It's a vicious situation.
And they're now largely soldiers.
A lot of people have been killed in the cities.
They look like demolition sites.
The thing with Ukraine is that many more people died than you're reporting.
You're not reporting the real numbers, and I'm not blaming you for that.
I'm blaming maybe our government for not wanting to release those numbers.
Many more people died than what you know about.
I don't know where he gets the numbers from or what he's referring to, but I'll take your sources and Ritter's sources over whatever.
Is being fed to him?
Is the CIA going to try and burnish its image somehow over this catastrophic disaster?
I think the strategy for the intelligence community is to treat him like a mushroom.
Keep him in the dark and feed him crap.
Remember, the CIA director can come over and see the president every day if he wants to.
That's what Pompeo did in order to...
Cultivate the president's goodwill and confidence and advance himself.
Radcliffe can certainly do that too.
But now you've got, hopefully, Tulsi Gabbard.
And she can be the truth teller that he so desperately needs.
And he really does.
He needs people to tell him the truth about everything.
Because if he doesn't demand it, they'll fall back on all the old false narratives that have been shaping everything in this country for years.
Let me go move on to Israel.
Do you believe that this is a real ceasefire that will be honored by the Israelis, or do you think it's an inauguration week pause?
I don't think it's real in the sense that no one ever planned for anything more than the first six weeks.
Now, we have to step back again and reevaluate the Israeli Defense Force.
How fit are they?
How ready to continue the battle are they?
What's the status on the home front?
What do people inside Israel want?
Now, I'm like everybody else.
I'm a prisoner when it comes to this sort of thing, to whatever comes to the mainstream press, although I do get snippets from Israeli television that are provided to me and some insights by friends in Europe.
But it looks like the Israeli Defense Force is in terrible shape.
I'm talking about the ground force.
The second thing is that the Israelis have begun to figure out that the advance of Turkish military power and influence through HTS all the way to the Golan Heights is not a victory.
It's a disaster.
And that disaster reaches into Jordan and Egypt.
And I think some of the senior military leaders are saying, look, you know, we're already overreaching.
We're overreaching on a scale that we never have before.
We've taken more losses than we ever have.
The population is no longer rock solid behind us.
We've got to rethink what we're doing.
I'm sure that's the case.
But I'm sure that Mr. Netanyahu also is concerned about President Trump because President Trump is someone who is going to look for an opportunity to negotiate some sort of settlement with Iran.
I mean, I know him.
This is not a warmonger by nature.
He may make threatening statements publicly.
But in truth, the last thing he wants is a full-blown war.
And if we get another negotiated settlement of some kind with Iran for Netanyahu and his confederates, that would be catastrophic.
Do you view the ceasefire as a defeat for Netanyahu?
Stated differently, can you opine as to how stable or unstable his government is?
You know, I have friends over there, but they stopped talking to me when I did not unconditionally support what they're doing.
So I can't really say with absolute certainty, but I suspect that things are not good.
I think Mr. Netanyahu knows it.
The issue for the Israelis from the very beginning of this tragedy, and I say tragedy because I think eventually it will come out, that 7 October was allowed to happen.
That 7 October was not a surprise.
There's plenty of evidence on the street right now.
And if that comes out, I think Mr. Netanyahu and his friends are going to be in very serious trouble at home.
It's used as an excuse to sort of practice arson across the region.
Here's somebody who has President Trump's ear, according to his own opinion.
This will rattle your stomach a little bit, so my apologies.
I won't even tell you who it is, but you'll see in a second.
Cut number four, Chris.
This war will never end with Hamas in charge of Gaza, politically or militarily.
Their days are numbered.
And the next question for the world is, what do we do about the Iran nuclear program?
That's where we're going to move to next.
There's diplomacy.
There's a one trillion chance you'll degrade the Iranian nuclear program through...
Yeah. Diplomacy, there's a 90% chance you'll degrade it through military action by Israel supported by the United States.
So the next topic I will be engaging in with President Trump is to take this moment in time to decimate the Iran nuclear program because they're so exposed.
What does that mean?
Help Israel deliver a knockout blow.
What does that mean?
You're going to urge him to have Israel bomb Iran's facilities that are underground and would require U.S. military support to actually be effective?
I'm going to urge the decimation of the Iranian nuclear program.
I don't think diplomacy works.
This is a religious Nazi regime.
They want to destroy the Jewish state.
They want to purify Islam and drive us out of the Mideast.
It would be like negotiating with Hitler.
I am hoping there will be an effort by Israel to decimate the Iran nuclear program supported by the United States.
And if we don't do that, it will be a historical mistake.
I hope he tells Senator Graham to go take a hike.
Well, it looks like the news anchor knocked him off his talking points, don't you think?
Yeah, she asked a very profound question.
You probably agree with the premise of her question.
The Israelis cannot do this on their own.
It would require American involvement.
And the Israelis will freely admit that in private.
I know that to be the case.
They've got to have us with them if they're going to go after the Iranians, and that's my point.
They should be concerned because I know President Trump, he's not interested in a major war.
He's not stupid.
He understands that war has destroyed every president who embarked on it.
It ultimately would have caught up with FDR as well, but he died and martyred himself in March of 45. Imagine if the truth of the Pearl Harbor report had come out and he was still alive, as well as the truth of what happened in Europe.
But those things were glossed over.
Right. It's always a disaster to go to war in this country.
We are not a state that is by its very nature marshal and ready to fight at the drop of a hat.
But, Judge, I think the more important thing here is that we're not going to have peace in this country until Mr. Leslie Graham and people like him sitting in the Senate and the House who have enriched themselves as a result of all this nonsense are removed from office.
Colonel, not too long ago, you warned of an impending World War III.
This was before the election of Donald Trump.
Actually, it was before we even thought that Trump could win in our private conversations.
Do you still feel that way?
We're not out of the woods by any stretch of the imagination.
As long as you have these senior officers, remember there are 44 of them.
I submitted a plan that went, thanks to RFK Jr., into the hands of J.D. Vance and others that cuts that back to 11 and changes the structure because it adopts a different strategy.
I think if someone takes that and sits down with the president, he would like it very much because the whole strategy is about avoiding war.
We've been in a business now, as you know, for 30 years of finding conflict.
Exploiting it and expanding it.
So he wants to get out of that.
I know he does.
So I hope somebody pays attention to that.
But unless you get rid of these people, this is not personal.
This is professional.
You know, you simply tell everybody, thank you very much.
Your services are no longer required.
And you send them off into retirement.
Let me tell you, the packages for these four stars and three stars is not poverty.
These people are walking out with enormous sums of money.
And the promise of 100% of their salary for the rest of their lives.
I mean, I think it's over the top, but that's what they're going to get.
So nobody needs to shed tears for them.
Same thing is true for the senior executive service types and many, many others.
Just retire them, send them away.
And then you come in with a new structure that says, look, we don't need this top-heavy force that's designed to seek not just military hegemony, Across the entire world, but to cultivate conflict.
This is crazy.
You know, you have all these four stars and these regional unified commands that are, in the words of someone, I think it was General Zinni, maybe somebody else who called them mini Caesars, who see themselves as governing these vast regional commands and controlling everything that's there.
The whole idea of diplomacy has been excluded from the vocabulary.
Anybody who suggests you talk to anyone is immediately tarred and feathered as some sort of Chamberlain-like appeaser.
Well, is the problem really too many four stars, or is the problem that Trump might listen to people like Lindsey Graham and Tom Cotton, who always want to start wars?
Well, I don't know.
That's something that I can't evaluate.
I would hope not.
Again, as I've said to many people, you know that I...
Think highly of Donald Trump.
I voted for him, as millions of others did, because we want him to extricate us from this disaster.
But the point is that Donald Trump's instincts are good.
And if he follows his instincts, we'll be fine.
And that's all that I can say.
So if people that are just poisoned, like this man Graham, walk into his office, then I suggest he take a stiff drink of Heavily caffeinated coffee and puke all over them and send them out.
The problem is he plays golf with Senator Graham on a regular basis, and I guess that's where these conversations take place.
Colonel, thank you very much for your time.
I know you and I have been emailing all week.
I think we've touched on everything you wanted to address, and I know you've answered everything that I I know it's a very busy week for you as it is here, but I very much appreciate your time.
Well, there's just one last thing, if I may, just for coming up.
Of course.
One of the things that the president is doing, well, the president is doing a number of good things, and if you read his executive orders, he's on the right track.
He's doing the right kinds of things.
I would urge him to do two things, though.
One is to be more bold.
10,000...
1,500 troops, 15,000, it's not enough for the border.
He needs to put that mission squarely in the hands of the United States Army.
They need to take that thing over.
They need to be responsible for it.
And until it is thoroughly secured, and I mean thoroughly secured, they should be held responsible for what happens on that border.
The Army's done that before.
You've got plenty of people out there that know how to do it.
They need to get that done.
And as soon as he can get the troops out of Europe right now, And send them back to the United States.
That's where you send them.
I know we have an aviation brigade from the 101st, which is supposedly on its way to Syria.
Well, I would stop that.
I would send that aviation brigade immediately back.
Does he even know that?
I don't think he does.
I don't think he does.
And this is another problem.
He's the commander-in-chief.
He should have a genuine war room somewhere in that White House.
And all of the forces...
Wherever they are, whatever they're doing should be illustrated clearly, unambiguously on that map.
And their status, their readiness to fight should be well known.
We've allowed the military to operate on its own without any real supervision or oversight.
That's how you've got Milley and his calls to China.
That's how you've gotten officers that have threatened various kinds of mutinous behavior if he's elected.
All that crap needs to go away.
But in order to get it away, he's got to refocus the whole institution on the defense of the United States, not everywhere else in the world.
I hope that he or somebody on his behalf is listening.
We know that somebody from his team watches the show.
Well, you never know.
Of course, you don't know how many things they've already thrown at the screen.
Thank you, Colonel.
God love you.
Thank you for your time.
Thank you for your patience.
Thank you for your articulation and your personal courage.
We'll see you again soon.
Thanks, Judge.
All the best.
Long day.
Save the best for last.
Coming up tomorrow, Friday, at the end of the day, the end of the week, 4.30 in the afternoon, the boys, the Intelligence Community Roundtable, Ray McGovern and Larry Johnson.
Have a nice evening, my friends.
Judge Napolitano for judging freedom.
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