All Episodes
Previous Next
Jan. 27, 2025 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
24:03
Ray McGovern : The CIA and Covid.
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
Today is Monday, January 27th, 2025.
Ray McGovern will be here with us in just a moment on, does Donald Trump favor ethnic cleansing?
But first this.
Markets are at an all-time high.
Euphoria has set in.
The economy seems unstoppable, but...
The last administration has buried us so deep in debt and deficits, it's going to take a lot of digging to get us out of this hole.
Are you prepared?
Lear Capital specializes in helping people like me and you grow and protect our wealth with gold.
Did you know that during Trump's last presidency, gold rose 54% to a record high?
If that happens again, that puts gold at $4,200 an ounce.
In his next term.
Don't wait.
Do what I did.
Call Lear at 800-511-4620 or go to learjudgenap.com for your free gold ownership kit and special report $4,200 gold ahead.
When you call, ask how you can also get up to $15,000 in bonus gold with a qualifying purchase.
Call 800-511-4620, 800-511-4620 or go to learjudgenap.com and tell them the job.
I've sent you.
Ray McGovern, welcome here, my dear friend.
Thank you for your time, as always.
Is Donald Trump still getting bad data from the CIA?
Well, he's getting it from somewhere.
Radcliffe is not really in place yet.
He just was confirmed last week.
So you can blame it on the people who told Bill Burns, or Bill Burns himself, who told the president in early July 2023 that Putin had already lost in Ukraine.
And his boss, the director of national intelligence, Averill Haynes, said in December of 2022...
That the Russians were running out of ammunition, and they had no indigenous capability to create the weapons that they were already losing en masse on the front.
So these are the same people that have come up with these ridiculous statistics about a million Russians lost, and also the, quote, failing Russian economy.
The Russian economy is not failing.
It grew by almost 4% last year.
I don't know where he's getting the information, but hopefully when Ratcliffe comes in, he'll get rid of all those people who are so wrong and unapologetically wrong and put in new people who know which end is up.
Well, last week, and I want to talk to you in a minute about former intel chiefs lying and the consequence of it.
But last week, President Trump stated publicly that the Russians had lost a million troops and that their economy was suffering.
We know their economy is not suffering, and we know that they haven't even lost 100,000 troops.
How could he be so reckless as to make comments like that?
Trump is unpredictable.
He gathers things out of the winds and shows them the truth.
I don't know if he really believes this stuff.
He makes up things all the time.
What about the 60 million people that the Russians lost in World War II and the fact that, you know, they helped us win.
Did you know that, Judge?
They helped us win.
Well, it wasn't 60 million.
It was 27 million.
Bad enough, right?
What? They helped us win?
Give me a break.
They bore the brunch of the Nazi onslaught.
Why is the issue of the Intel chiefs having, former Intel chiefs and Intel personnel, having lied about Hunter Biden's laptop, why is that now an issue in the second week of Trump's administration?
Well, Trump erased it.
He talked about these 51 former...
Intelligence directors and deputy directors.
I knew some of them, Judge.
I worked under some of them.
I worked with some of them.
It was a catastrophe.
51, okay?
51 of the best, right?
Presumably. What happened?
Well... When Hunter Biden's laptop rose, and it showed that he and daddy may have been really very guilty of graft and all kinds of other undertakings with the Chinese government as well as the Ukrainian government, they had to do something.
Okay, what did they do?
Well, Tony Blinken, not Secretary of State yet, he called up this guy Mikey Murrell, who was acting director of the CIA for several years, said, Mikey, we've got to do something about this because...
Well, because Biden and Trump are going to have a debate just next week.
I got an idea.
Could we get the story out that this was a Russian intelligence disinformation operation, this Hunter laptop?
Mikey Murrow.
Can do.
Could you get about 10 of them?
10 of them?
I got you 50. He gets 50 in three days.
Tax on his own name because he was an acting director, right?
51, and they put out this statement, false on its face, saying, you know, this bears all the traditional earmucks of a very Russian intelligence disinformation operation.
Now, that was put out three days before the final debate.
Trump, unaccustomed still, after four years almost, to the ways of Washington, raises it with Biden.
A laptop of hundreds that has shown all this irregularities.
And Biden says, Mr. Trump, don't you know that 51 former intelligence directors and deputy directors have already said that that's a Russian intelligence disinformation operation?
Don't you know about that?
No, Trump wasn't prepared for that.
Suffice it to say.
The election came next.
You want to talk about interference?
Interference by...
Well, to whom did these 50 or 51 make the statement?
I'm trying to decide if there's a felony here.
Is this on some official letterhead delivered to Congress?
Well, it's the equivalent.
It was too political.
What happened was this fellow who worked for...
For Brennan, John Brennan, head of the CIA for years and years, Shapiro, I think his name, went around and collected all these things, okay, gave them to Politico.
They published them.
And, you know, if that's not interfering in an election, I don't know what is, did it tip the balance?
I just don't know.
But we'll ever find out for sure.
Was it egregious?
Yes. Was it a felony?
I'm not a lawyer, so I can say.
Sure as hell it was.
Why is Jack Brennan sweating bullets over this now?
Well, you know the old saying, why Brennan and James Comey could play fast and loose with the Constitution.
In doing things that no FBI or CIA director had done internally before, namely try to prevent Trump from becoming president, and then when he became president, trying to make sure that he was emasculated from doing anything useful abroad.
So this was the first time.
How did Comey explain that?
Here were a book.
Sometimes they write books.
And the book said, I was operating in an environment where Hillary Rodden Clinton We're sure to become the next president of the United States.
So, Judge, if you're operating in that kind of an environment, okay, you're going to play flaccid loose with the law, with the regulations, everything else, because you'll get promoted once you get elected.
You won't be this.
You won't be in any jeopardy.
Whoa, look what happens, okay?
Biden wins once, and now he loses.
So what does Bretton face?
A completely new situation, and Trump has already said, On the record, he knows what John Brennan played in the role in this kind of thing and in all of Russiagate, and so does Radcliffe.
And if Kash Patel comes in, he can easily find out if he doesn't know already.
So Brennan is getting on every TV outlet he can to show what a great guy he is and to say, I never did anything untoward.
Well, he sure as hell did, and now he's sweating bullets.
Fascinating stuff.
I want to switch gears.
But sticking with Donald Trump.
And I want to play a clip for you, which to me was unsettling, and I know it was unsettling to you.
Chris, cut number four.
I said to him, I'd love you to take on more.
Because I'm looking at the whole Gaza script right now, and it's a mess.
It's a real mess.
See, he'd like Jordan to house people from Gaza.
I'd like him to take people.
I'd like Egypt to take people.
I'm talking to General Sisi tomorrow sometime, I believe.
And I'd like Egypt to take people, and I'd like Jordan to take people.
You're talking about probably a million and a half people.
And we just clean out that whole thing.
And I don't know, something has to happen.
It's literally a demolition site right now.
Almost everything's demolished and people are dying there.
So I'd rather get involved with some of the Arab nations and build housing in a different location where they can maybe live in peace.
Temporarily? It could be either.
It could be temporarily.
It could be long term.
That, of course, was President Trump last night or yesterday afternoon on Air Force One.
Suggesting that a million and a half Palestinians would be forcibly removed to Jordan or to Egypt?
I mean, for what moral or legal reason would the United States participate in that?
Well, Mr. Trump, of course, is a real estate developer from New York, okay?
They don't care much about tenants.
They care about real estate and what it's worth.
You know, Gaza, as Trump has said recently, it's a beautiful place.
If you look at the seashore there and the possibilities for the development, Judge, the word sociopath is not too much here.
Trump doesn't seem to care about what happens.
Let me just stop you for a second.
We are watching tens of thousands of Palestinians gathering in Gaza today to wait to cross by foot into northern Gaza, from which they were forcibly displaced by the IDF using American...
Ammunition and weapons more than 15 months ago.
Go ahead, please, Ray.
Yeah, I think that photo actually, not that one, but the earlier one showing the bottleneck, showing that little space where some people were allowed in.
That was from yesterday.
There were thousands trying to get in.
They were bottled up.
The number of trucks trying to get into Gaza is way, way down from what the commitment was for this little truce or whatever you call it.
Now, when I heard what Trump said about, oh, it looks really bad, but nothing we can do about it.
Besides, it's got possibilities for real estate development.
I said, not only South Europe, but that sounds familiar.
And I went back and looked at my records.
This all happened before.
George W. Bush, okay?
Now, as governor of Texas, he was invited by the Republican Jewish Coalition to visit Israel, 1998.
Okay? Now, he went with Sharon, the prime minister at the time, and they overflew the occupied territories.
And Bush is quoted as saying, my God, this is awful.
It's time to end Americans' efforts to repair this.
I don't see anything we can do over there at this point.
So the only thing that he didn't include, that Trump includes now, is the real estate development possibilities.
He decided he wasn't going to do anything, and at that first National Security Council meeting, and we know this from somebody who was there, O'Neill, he said, well, yo, we're going to give Sharon his head.
Anybody know Sharon?
Powell said, yeah, I know.
Well, we've got to give him his head.
No more honest broker stuff.
What's he going to do?
And Powell said, sir, that might cause problems.
And Bush said, okay, so everybody agreed?
Okay, agreed.
That's how it went down at the first National Security Council meeting.
And the whole point was, I overflew that territory.
It was awful.
And there's nothing we can do about it.
Now, look at it.
Look at that beach.
It is, you know.
I mean, you put a couple billion dollars in there, take it away from Zelensky, and you can make some really nice high-rises there.
And his son-in-law has already talked about that.
So talk about a human tragedy for immoral reasons.
That's what's going on here.
It's breathtaking.
Now, the Egyptians and the Jordanians said, no deal.
We're not going to accept those.
But, you know, this was tried before by Blinken.
Right after the October 7 events, Blinken said, you know, he went to Cairo and he said, hey, Cece, this is what we're going to do.
We'll provide the tents.
You accept all these guys from Gaza.
We'll put them up in the Sinai and then we'll figure out what to do with them.
And Cece left them to scorn and said, get out of here.
So that was the end of that until now.
Here it arises again.
It's unconscionable.
I dare say that it's the work of...
Psychopaths who think they could do this and get away with it.
Here he is.
This is on the day of his inauguration, late in the day.
So this is a week ago.
President Trump on redeveloping.
I wonder if he had his son-in-law in mind.
Gaza Strip.
Cut number five, Chris.
I'm not confident.
It's not our war, it's their war, but I'm not confident, but I think they're very weakened on the other side.
Gaza, boy, I looked at a picture of Gaza.
Gaza is like a massive demolition site.
That place is, it's really...
It's got to be rebuilt in a different way.
Do you plan to help rebuilding Gaza?
My mind.
You know, Gaza's interesting.
It's a phenomenal location.
On the sea, best weather.
You know, everything's good.
It's like some beautiful things could be done with it, but it's very interesting.
But some fantastic things could be done with Gaza.
How do you see the future in governance for Gaza?
Well, it depends.
I can't imagine.
You certainly can't have the people that were there.
Most of them are dead.
I mean, I have to say what I'm thinking, which is we'll move them out, we'll ship them to Jordan or Egypt, and my son-in-law will develop the real estate and make a fortune.
But that is, as you called it earlier, psychopathic.
Yeah, Judge, the only difference between some of those really hardliners in Netanyahu's government is that Trump is, well, I was going to say he's dumb enough to say it out loud, okay?
I don't think it's dumb enough.
I just think that he doesn't think we care.
He doesn't think Americans care.
Well, we do care.
And now's the time to step forward, not only with respect to people in Gaza.
But with respect to people in Chicago and Newark and people who are being rounded up, put on planes, and sent elsewhere under the new immigration policies of Trump, it's the same thing.
He thinks we don't care.
Now, let's give him a lot of evidence that we do care.
There are lots of people trying to help people who are illegals.
In my view, there's no such a thing as an Does Trump have any reason for trusting?
Netanyahu, I mean, we all know that his government will collapse if he doesn't send the IDF back into Gaza to start killing these people.
Well, the Trump-Netanyahu symbiosis is something very similar to the one between W. Bush and Sharon.
Sharon, as you know, is a big guy, you know?
Tough, tough guy.
And Little Bush really, really liked to see that.
He was going to imitate him.
And so he let him do what he wanted to do.
Now the day went by after 9-11 before Sharon sent his tanks into Janine on the West Plank.
It was, you know, it's pretty flagrant.
So I don't know how you separate the two.
I know that now Trump has just authorized two...
1,000-pound bombs to do their work in Gaza and West Bank and other places.
He is no better.
If he has authorized the use of 2,000-pound bombs once the conflagration resumes on civilians, he is no better in this respect than his predecessor, Genocide Joe.
Well, worse still.
I mean, what's worse than worse?
You're right, Judge.
I thought there might be some sensible change in policy.
There were signs that, you know, that Netanyahu was not completely unknown to Trump and that he was a tough guy too.
And, you know, with him facing down Netanyahu once, okay, maybe he could do it twice.
But the 2,000-pound bombs authorized by the White House over the weekend for the Defense Department to do that, that shows me...
That he doesn't seem to care about this.
He's going to support Netanyahu with the thing that Netanyahu needs most, and that is bombs that break up whole city blocks in Gaza and elsewhere in the occupied territories.
Well, I don't know how this is going to end, Ray, but thank you for your courage in pointing all of it out as you have.
You mentioned Newark.
New Jersey ICE arrested American citizens in Newark, one of whom was a veteran of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
Now, they were eventually released, but this is what happens when the government decides to forget about the Constitution, which still requires arrest warrants.
We'll see where all this goes.
I have a feeling we're just at the tip of the iceberg.
There's one little end note here.
I learned today from Hartford, Connecticut, that actually the authorities there are giving immigrants or emigres guidance.
What they're saying is, look, you have the right to be silent.
You don't have to sign anything.
You don't have to do anything with respect to a warrant unless it's signed by a judge.
You have rights, whatever your status, under the Constitution of the United States, to stay silent, to not speak without the presence of a lawyer, blah, blah, blah.
Well, this is a municipal authority telling these poor people, look, we're going to at least assert your rights.
You do the same.
And I have to say that here in Raleigh, where I live, there's an outfit called siembra, meaning to plant, to plant seeds of solidarity.
And we're being very alert in a neighborhood type of thing so that when unmarked cars with dark windows come up, we make polite inquiries.
And I'm told that nine out of ten times these people posing as police authorities rub up their motor and get out of town because they're...
We need to put a little...
They need a little push.
Ray McGovern, thank you very much, my dear friend.
Thank you for your courage and your big heart.
We'll see you at the end of the week with Larry Johnson.
Most welcome, Judge.
Okay. All the best.
And coming up, the aforementioned Larry Johnson at 11.30 this morning.
At 1 o'clock this afternoon, Ben Cohen of Ben and Jerry's, who's been battling for peace.
His entire adult life.
And at 4 o'clock this afternoon, another warrior for peace, Scott Ritter.
Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom.
▲
Export Selection