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Jan. 28, 2025 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
23:46
LtCOL. Karen Kwiatkowski : Trump and Ukraine.
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Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
Today is Tuesday, January 28th, 2025.
Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski will be here with us in just a moment on President Trump and Ukraine.
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I've set you.
Colonel Korkowski, welcome here.
I do want to spend some time with you exploring your thoughts and understandings of Trump and Ukraine.
But first, some of the latest from Israel.
Do you think that Donald Trump has the same contempt for the personal freedom of Palestinians that Joe Biden did?
That's a good question.
I think that Trump is very sensitive to people achieving their dreams, which is to say having liberty.
So this is one reason he's very popular.
And of course, Biden never distinguished himself being overly concerned with anyone's freedom or liberty.
So Trump has the potential very much to be receptive if he would.
If he could get the right information, if he could see the right people, I think he is very much influenceable by people that understand the Palestinians have a right to the land that they live, their lives in the land that they live on.
It's an easy sell.
The whole rest of the world has already bought that because it's an easy sell.
It makes a lot of sense.
If he would surround himself or at least be exposed to people that would give him an alternative view, I think he would be very much influenced by that.
Here he is on the evening of his inauguration.
He appears to be signing executive orders, and yet there are press in the Oval Office asking him questions.
And in my view, his answer seems to be more that of a real estate developer Yeah.
...
than a president of the United States, but I welcome your view, Chris.
Cut number five.
...
that you can keep the ceasefire in Gaza and conclude the three phases of this deal.
I'm not confident.
It's not our war.
It's their war, but...
I apologize.
I'm not confident, but I think they're very weakened on the other side.
Do you support the two states?
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 is 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.
So ill-informed, most of them are dead.
In fact, we'll play in a minute the view of an Israeli negotiator that Hamas has triumphed and is very much still in charge.
But do you agree with me?
It sounded more like you wanted to see it developed to Oceanside mansions rather than return to the people from whom it was taken and whose homes and schools and synagogues and hospitals were destroyed by Made in America.
Yeah, that's true.
When he spoke, there's a couple things that kind of tell you how he's being misinformed.
First off, the rebuilding of the condos and the great beaches and whatnot, the weather.
That's right out of his son-in-law.
That's right out of the many in the Israeli cabinet feel this way.
They want to take this land and profit from it.
He said he saw one picture.
He said, I saw a picture of Palestine.
Well, the rest of the world has been watching these.
He has not been paying attention at all, clearly, to what's going on.
He also knows nothing, apparently, or he wasn't reminded of anything that he knew from the history of Gaza in particular, but also the history of all the occupied territories and how various wars and constant war And if we can use the word apartheid,
that condition of separation, the way that you have several classes of people, some with rights, some with far fewer rights.
This has been going on for quite a long time.
The other thing that struck me is he didn't mention the gas fields right off those beautiful beaches.
There's many reasons why Israel covets Gaza Strip.
Many, many reasons.
It's a concise piece of property.
It has all those great characteristics.
There's gas there.
And the Palestinians of Gaza in particular, they have not yet been able to subdivide into compartments as they have done in occupied West Bank and in other parts of Israel where Palestinians live.
They tear it up in tiny little chunks and there's checkpoints and everything.
With Gaza, you had basically...
Before this, 2.3 million Gazans pretty well connected to each other.
And that is a frightening thing for the Zionists, of course.
And then leading into the video I'm sure you're going to show next, that these people are still together.
And they are still motivated.
They still love Gaza.
They're not leaving.
They're not going anywhere.
They have survived, which is to say they have won.
Chris, cut number four, version two.
I said to him, I'd love you to take on war, because I'm looking at the whole Gaza script right now, and it's a mess.
It's a real mess.
See, you'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.
I mean, 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, but 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...
Jordan, Egypt, different location.
So I go back to my original question.
Does he share the same contempt?
For the personal liberty of these people that Joe Biden did.
This is their land.
This is not the land of the destroyers.
This is the land of the destroyed.
That's right.
Trump is echoing very distinctly and in some ways superficially because he doesn't really understand where it's all coming from.
But he's echoing the Zionist language that has been going on regarding Gaza and other parts of the West Bank.
Any place that there's some land or property that the Zionists covet for themselves, this is their story.
Why don't those people just leave so we can go in and build pretty buildings?
You know, as I'm looking at that destruction, which is clearly, it is the rubble, the level of destruction, the number of bombs, and just it's incredible what they've done, what the Israelis have done to Gaza.
You can see the remnants of buildings.
And I don't know if Trump realizes, but all of those buildings and all of what was in Gaza was constructed, was built, while the Israelis were limiting the concrete and the food and the supplies and the equipment and the technology that you would need to build something wonderful.
They built something pretty darn wonderful under Terribly difficult, constrained economic situation, which was made and created for them by Israel.
So I think it's kind of miraculous what we're seeing in that video there, just kind of insanely miraculous.
Your colleague Matt Ho thinks that those pictures are pictures of the century showing...
Massive numbers of people.
Trump's right about the number.
It's about a million and a half people marching steadily back toward their homes, which they know are destroyed, and doing so with glee.
I want to run for you a clip from Daniel Levy.
I don't know if you know him.
I never heard of him before yesterday when Chris found the clip, but he is a former Israeli negotiator, personal friend of Alistair Crook and Ambassador One cannot underestimate the impact on the Israeli public psyche of
the release, the initial three who were released.
And, of course, everyone, therefore, saw those images.
They've been told.
Al-Qassam defeated.
They've been told the public has turned against them.
They've been told so many things.
And then they saw those images.
An occupying army.
Armed and aided by the most powerful military in the world, the US.
A nuclear armed state.
Israel. In a struggle between that.
And a resistance movement.
We saw a very powerful display.
And Israelis saw that.
We're being told by Israeli analysts, talking heads, political leaders, and their backers in the West, that the next phase has to be to move forward.
We have to have the demilitarization of...
The reality is the most significant force in Gaza, by a long stretch, is Hamas.
Al-Qassam emerges from this with a very strong narrative.
Israel's narrative doesn't look so good at all.
The Tel Aviv or whatever, the state media in Israel is trying to spin the release of the female soldiers that happened a couple, three days ago.
You know, those four women, young women, soldiers had been held for quite a long time, obviously since October 7th.
And they were released with gifts, with smiles on their faces, looking very healthy, articulating.
It didn't seem to be under great pressure, articulating their appreciation for what their captors had, how they had treated them and provided for them, made a point that the Israeli bombardment was endangering their lives, which of course is something that many in Israel understood very well,
that they wanted those hostages back before Israeli bombs destroyed them.
A few days, actually probably within a day, of these videos hitting the domestic airstreams.
And of course, very popular because this is huge.
This is what Israel wanted.
This is the reason there's a ceasefire, to get their hostages back.
And yet immediately starts to spin it that, well, these people were badly treated, but then a few weeks or a few days before they were well fed.
Okay, so very stupid and silly.
Excuses for trying to counteract what Israelis are, what is dawning on most Israelis about the expense and the lack of success that this latest really five-front war that Netanyahu has launched,
you know, it hasn't worked at all.
It has been counterproduction.
It has been a waste.
And I think, I don't know if there's anything comparable in our own American history where we We recognize so immediately and so massively that our government has made a huge mistake.
I don't even know if there's anything that compares to it.
Switching gears, can Trump intimidate President Putin into showing up at a negotiating table of Trump's choosing in order to negotiate the settlement of the war in Ukraine?
Or does Putin just laugh at Trump when he says some of these crazy things like a million Russian soldiers have been killed and the economy is in tatters and Putin's leadership is being jeopardized?
Yeah, well, Trump can't intimidate Mr. Putin.
He is quite unintimidatable.
And we have plenty of evidence of this.
But Putin is also...
He would like to see a settlement, an agreement, something that works for Russia's needs in Ukraine.
You know, these are Slavs fighting Slavs.
This is horrendous for Russia to have to be involved in this.
There's no doubt.
At the same time, it's necessary.
It's seen by the Russians as very much a necessary thing.
So, yes, he will speak with Trump, and I imagine he might even speak with him at the location of Trump's choosing.
He's not going to make Trump...
I don't think that's part of it.
And you have to, I don't know, I saw, I don't know if it was Grok or one of the other AI calculators, you asked them a question and they said, who's the better chess player, Trump or Putin?
And it was Putin.
And who's the better chess player, Trump or Z?
And it was Z. So these guys, they're not intimidated by Trump.
Certainly Putin is not.
But they also are not, they're not trying to alienate themselves from him.
And I noticed just in the past week, Putin mentioned in some of the, it was played in Russian media and not so much in the American media, but Putin mentioned in passing, in context of other things, how Trump's 2020 election had been stolen from him.
Basically saying if it had not been stolen, maybe he's right, this war wouldn't have happened.
To me, that's very Pompeo-esque.
That's very seductive and sly in the way that you would deal with Mr. Trump.
You would flatter him.
You would understand him, show that you appreciate what he has gone through and what he is.
But from Trump's perspective, Karen, what could he possibly think he's gaining by repeating falsehoods, many of which are insulting?
About the Russian people and the Kremlin.
Well, again, Trump is so ill-informed.
And remember, we had him for four years as president, and he was often ill-informed.
I mean, this was something we came to accept about Trump.
And of course, yeah, I'm not comparing him to other presidents.
I think George Bush was ill-informed, Obama.
I think they're all pretty ill-informed.
But Trump, being a non-politician, non-insider...
He wasn't the son of a president.
He wasn't an inside politician, activist, or anything like that.
So he does come from outside.
And it's understandable that he may not get the information offered to him in his social circles that other presidents might be.
But he has.
He's been president for a week.
He has.
But I think even speaking to Putin if Trump Does that, and I know he intends to do that, and they will meet at some point.
I think in preparation for that meeting, he will be coached.
And in speaking to Putin, Putin understands how to communicate with whoever he needs to communicate to, and that includes Trump.
So I would assess Putin will help educate him.
And, you know, you recall when Tucker Carlson did the Putin interview?
Remember that?
It lasted about an hour and a half.
In the first 30 minutes, Putin was giving us Russian history, like no American could care less.
You know, we don't care about that.
But he was setting a stage of history and understanding and relationships and things that have passed.
Right. In order to go into the current context of what's happening.
And so that his audience would understand what he's saying.
I imagine that Trump will get an education, and he is receptive to education.
And he has a goal, and he wants to be done with Ukraine.
There's no doubt about that.
In fact, the only thing Ukraine is left in terms of political usefulness is to nail some of Biden's crooks.
Do we know if the U.S. military pipeline is still open?
Because if it is, that's contrary to what Trump promised.
And if it's not...
Why isn't President Zelensky complaining, and why hasn't the Ukraine military collapsed?
Well, the Ukraine military is very close to collapse.
There's no doubt about that.
I mean, they are rolling backward.
They're not able to...
I mean, they are rapidly receding from every point where they have contact with the Russians.
Now, this has kind of been the way it has been, but it is accelerating.
He can't recruit.
I think he tried to lower the enlistment age again.
None of this is working.
50% or more of the people that remain in Ukraine are ready to...
They don't want the land.
They want peace.
So that war, from a Ukrainian perspective, is finishing up.
Now, Zelensky is a little kind of a weaselly kind of guy.
And he's very much stressed.
He's very much stressed because the walls are coming in around him.
You do not want to be Zelensky right now.
No one should want to be that.
He is very concerned about his survival, not even political survival.
I'm sure it's the actual human survival.
And he is in no position to complain about weapons that weren't delivered.
On the other hand, I think Biden did a pretty good job of getting them out of...
I wonder if that applies to the CIA as well,
whose budget contrary Yeah.
You know, we haven't really heard much about Trump's views about the CIA.
He does not criticize the CIA.
Criticizes everything else.
He's cutting everything else.
He's freezing hiring and all this.
But we don't hear him talk about the CIA.
I think that's smart.
I think that's smart right now.
Because presidents that complain and talk about the CIA have bad things happen to them.
Yes, that we know.
Although I do expect that the JFK assassination files will be denuded.
Oh, yeah.
There'll be nothing in there pointing fingers at your former colleagues, that's for sure.
Karen, it's a pleasure.
Thank you, my dear friend.
I'd love chatting with you.
Very much appreciated.
Great new piece on Judge Knapp and elsewhere.
All the best.
All right.
Thanks. Thanks.
Bye, Judge.
Sure. Bye-bye.
Coming up tomorrow, Wednesday, January 29, Aaron Maté at noon, Professor Jeffrey Sachs at one, Colonel Douglas McGregor at two, Phil Giraldi at three.
A good day.
Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom.
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