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March 20, 2025 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
22:49
COL. Lawrence Wilkerson : Can Ukraine Survive?
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Hi, everyone.
Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
Today is Thursday, March 20th, 2025.
My dear friend, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson joins us now.
Colonel Larry, always a pleasure.
Congratulations on that new camera.
Not only can we see you better, you look younger.
I don't know how you pulled that off, but thank you.
Thank you, Colonel.
Thanks for coming, Danny.
It's the blemish of the kiss.
Oh, right, right.
When I kissed you on your forehead at that restaurant in New York.
But thank you very much for your time.
I want to spend some time with you on how perilous Ukraine is as a sovereign country.
But before we get there, some other questions.
A hot issue here in New York.
It should be a hot issue.
All over the country is the efforts by the Trump administration to suppress free speech.
The case of which I speak is a Columbia University grad student who was just yanked out of his dorm room where he lives with his wife.
She's expecting their baby next month.
She's an American.
There was no arrest warrant.
There was no search warrant.
And he was shipped to Louisiana.
His lawyers have filed all kinds of efforts to get him back here.
Excuse me, the judge compromised by bringing him back to New Jersey.
A crazy jurisdictional issue I don't want to get into.
But if you look at the charging documents, they don't allege criminal activity.
They don't allege violation of a statute.
They don't allege any terror.
They don't allege any inappropriate behavior.
Here's my question to you, because I don't know if Colin Powell ever did this.
They merely allege that in the opinion of Marco Rubio, who probably never heard of this kid, the young man is a material impediment to the execution of American foreign policy by his...
place on the Columbia University campus.
Why the hell is the State Department
Judge, I suspect it's the only person or reason that they could conjure at the moment in order to throw out there from a principal cabinet officer.
And I have to tell you that if that's the case, if Rubio asserts that Khalil's actions somehow impacted national security to the point that a case should be brought against him.
Then you and I are in grave danger, as is everyone who appears on your show and shows like yours, because we are also speaking words that could be construed in Marco Rubio's fertile little mind, and I'm afraid to say Donald Trump's mind,
as being injurious to U.S. national security, because U.S. national security includes murdering Palestinians again and again and again.
This guy has been accused of agitating for a Palestinian state.
Now, the two-state solution has been the public policy of the United States since 1948.
They haven't done anything about it, but it's been the public policy.
How could it possibly be the basis for a removal proceeding?
It's a public policy that every single Secretary of State, in varying degrees of intensity...
Pursued since that time until Marco Rubio, apparently.
We no longer are even saying that we are in favor of two states, period.
I want to play for you John Mearsheimer's theory as to who's behind this.
I don't think this will surprise you at all.
Chris?
When Secretary Rubio rescinds the green card of a person he probably never heard of, Because of statements the person made on the Columbia University campus last April.
This, of course, is a big deal here in New York.
It should be a big deal everywhere because it's an attack on freedom of speech like we haven't seen in this country in many generations.
But I suspect it is the Trump Department of Homeland Security and DOJ doing a favor for the president's Zionist backers.
The truth is, Judge, that the single greatest threat to freedom of speech in the United States at this point in time is Israel and its supporters here in the United States.
It's truly amazing the extent to which Israel's supporters are going to enormous lengths to shut down free speech, not only on university campuses, but all across the country.
He's absolutely right.
And this anti-Semitism conference that Netanyahu was convening in Israel, which has now been spurned by most sane Jewish leaders in America and denounced by the president of Israel, is a case in point.
And it just spreads itself all across Israel, all across this country.
Anti-Semitism is not just a sword they wield now.
It is the singular sword that they will.
Let me just read something to you, too, that I think is really pertinent here.
Please.
This is from the English version of Haaretz.
It's by their editor-in-chief, the English version, Esther Solomon.
And she opens up with this paragraph, which is, "Every American ought to listen to this woman's writing."
This week, Israelis woke up to war again, but this time, not to the Hamas surprise attack of October the 7th, but to a conscious decision by their government to restart fighting against the will of the popular majority, which consistently favors an end of the war and the return of the hostages.
This same week, the Netanyahu government intensified its battles on two other fronts as well.
These are key fronts, that's my words.
It's war on Israeli democracy.
And it's war on diaspora Jews.
It wants no more diaspora Jews.
It wants only the Jews that are acceptable to it to deepen and enhance its revolting state.
That's the Ben Gavir and Smotrich.
Yes, back in.
Here's another headline.
Here's another one.
Israeli cops wound anti-war protesters in Jerusalem.
These anti-war protesters were Israeli citizens.
They were met after they had been wounded with these words from the cops.
Ben Gavir is back.
You're done.
Unquote.
Wow.
Wow.
While we're on this...
Almost a state of civil war.
You think that this type of attitude only exists in Israel?
Watch this from the...
Director of the FBI, Chris number 13. You will see what we did with Israel and the Prime Minister and our special forces and their intel operation.
We will be standing side by side with them.
We will shut off the machinery that feeds money into Iran.
We need America to wake up and prioritize Israel.
We need to bring home Americans and end this war.
Bring home Israelis and make sure we stand by our number one ally in Israel.
And people need to wake up.
I thought the FBI was a domestic law enforcement.
I didn't know it was the job of the FBI ostentatiously to endorse the governmental policies of Benjamin Netanyahu.
Nor I. And you see what's happening to Ronan Bitt, the director of the National Security Organization, Kal Shin Bet, in Israel.
We might as well put them together now if he's going to get rid of Ronan Bitt.
Kash Patel's equivalent in Israel.
Let them get together and let them go to hell together.
Wow.
While all this is going on, a professor of medicine, a Lebanese woman, a nephrologist, a kidney expert, which happens to be a field of medicine in which there are not enough physicians in the United States,
with a medical practice in Providence, Rhode Island, and students at the medical school.
She took a trip to Lebanon to attend the funeral of Hassan Nasrallah.
She was stopped at Logan Airport.
They didn't know where she had come from.
Without a warrant, they seized her cell phone.
The cell phone demonstrated indisputably that she had been there.
They asked her about it, and she said, I followed him.
He's dead now.
I followed him religiously, but I don't follow his politics.
They kept her for 36 hours, during the course of which her lawyers obtained an order from a federal judge in Providence.
She is not to be deported until I, the judge, holds a hearing.
They disregarded the order and deported her.
Just like they did with the 156 so-called Venezuelan gang members, a judge said, do not deport them until I can hold a hearing.
The planes have already left.
Tell the planes to turn around.
Oh, we don't understand your order.
Okay.
Have you ever seen in your years in the State Department before or since such disdain for the rule of law, for the basic values of the Constitution?
Freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of association, due process, basic fairness, as we see today.
Judge, I'm sorry to say I have.
I saw a president who directed that other human beings be held incognito, more or less, and tortured.
I served a president who sent...
American citizens and others to places like Syria and Egypt and Morocco and elsewhere where we knew damn well they would be tortured.
I sat on three different study groups and one commission in North Carolina.
I found out, for example, that when the CIA was rendering some of these people through the airport in North Carolina, they actually tortured them on the plane in North Carolina.
So we had a whole new legal regime open up for us.
Torture on American soil, not just in foreign capitals to whom they were rendered.
I've seen it before, Judge, and I've seen it in history, too, in terms of my reading, when Joe McCarthy was kind of running rampant over the American government with regard to communists.
We've done this sort of thing before.
I'm afraid we're into a new era of it that may outstrip all those past eras.
It saddens me deeply, my column this week.
Perilous Times for Personal Liberty at the Washington Times and a couple dozen other venues articulates how unconstitutional this behavior has become.
And here I am at Newsmax, where I work during the day, defending the right of the judiciary to engage in judicial review, which is the power to review and to void.
what the executive or legislative branch does when it violates the Constitution or violates the statutes.
Let's get to Putin and Trump.
Let me just, one more comment.
I heard one of the Trumpsters the other day.
I think it's apocryphal, but it made his point that Andrew Jackson said when the Supreme Court essentially said Georgia couldn't kick the Cherokees out.
Andrew Jackson said, well, now the court is rule, let them enforce it.
That's sort of, whether Jackson said it or not, that's pretty much what Hegseth and Rubio and Trump are saying.
Right, right.
Well, Hegseth is involved in the case before Judge Boesberg.
The DOJ lawyer said, well, Judge, the pilots are over international waters.
You don't have jurisdiction over them.
A, he does, because wherever the government goes, the Constitution goes.
But B, the pilots were defendants.
Their bosses were.
The Secretary of Homeland Security is a defendant in that case.
The Secretary of Defense is a defendant in that case.
The President of the United States is a defendant in that case.
And he clearly has jurisdiction over them.
I think some lawyers are going to lose their licenses to practice law because they followed a political moniker and not a legal one.
And we haven't seen the end of it, which is only the tip of the iceberg, Colonel.
You warned earlier that they may come after us.
I said the same thing about those lawyers who ruled on torture and ruled positively for it.
And I see no accountability whatsoever.
I hope you're right.
I hope there is no accountability.
The president whose behavior you condemned is George W. Bush, one of those lawyers who ruled for torture, is now a United States appeals court judge.
His involvement in the torture, I don't want to mention his name, was hidden by the Bush administration from the Senate until after his confirmation.
Many senators went wild over this when they learned about it, but there was nothing they could do.
The nominee didn't hide it.
The Bush administration hid it.
Okay.
Do you put any stock in this so-called non-cease-fire cease-fire in which Putin probably said to Trump, why don't you stop arming them?
And Trump said, well, why don't you stop killing them?
And they agreed to stop bombing or attacking energy infrastructures for a month.
How do you read this?
Then for the next 24 hours, they attacked each other's energy infrastructure.
Right.
You know, a ceasefire is not worth a penny if the two sides don't have any reason to support it.
And I see that as one of the huge problems here, but I see that as Mearsheimer and others have said, and Chas Freeman knows a lot more about these sorts of things than I do, but we really have a problem here in the fact that one side has decidedly won on the battlefield and can keep on going on the battlefield.
Oh, yeah, it can be slowed here and there with drones and other things, but it is inexorably grinding up Ukrainian territory and Ukrainian youth.
And the other side is lost.
It doesn't seem to know what to do because Europe tells it one thing.
The United States tells it something else.
Something happens like...
Cutting off intelligence and weapons and money, and then it comes back on again.
I wouldn't want to be in the middle if I were Ukraine.
It should be so crystal clear to them now that all they are is a tool, a tool of the empire and NATO, and that they're going to come out on the losing side of this, and Putin knows that too.
So why should he even be interested in anything Trump offers other than a new relationship between Washington and Moscow?
So getting beyond this is how you get to that.
And I'm increasingly of a mind it's going to be really a long time before we get beyond this.
Were you surprised when President Putin donned military fatigues and appeared ostentatiously in public and with military officers in Kyrgyz?
and ordered the commanding general to end it and did so on international television, and now it has nearly ended.
Did any of this surprise you?
Not really.
I think that was a dramatic statement that what I just said is true.
I've won.
Now, if you people want to talk, I'm willing to talk, and I'm willing to talk because there's a bigger issue here.
It's restored relations between Washington and Moscow, and ultimately between Europe and Moscow.
But I'll take the first first.
And that's what it's all about.
If you don't want to get to that subject through all this mirage of crap you've strewn in the battlefield path in front of me, then so be it.
I'll just keep on marching.
I'll just keep on marching.
How much longer?
I keep asking you and Ritter and McGregor this, the ex-military guys.
How much longer do you think Zelensky's military can last?
Is there no end to it if we just keep supplying them with material?
It doesn't take very many human beings to send drones to Moscow.
It's a very good question, and it's an element of this new battlefield that we're watching every day.
I suppose you could hang out for quite a long time, but I think you could also pose the reality that it might collapse at any moment.
And when it does...
You might give the enemy, such as he is, a bit more incentive because you have collapsed virtually in front of him, physically, realistically, totally collapsed.
And then what's Putin going to do?
What's the Russian army going to do?
Can Ukraine survive this as an intact, sovereign nation?
If it goes for neutrality, makes that neutrality very obvious by its actions, its diplomacy, and its other means of showing the world what it is now.
If it backs away from even EU membership, and Poland and other EU members would love that because they do not want it to be a member of the EU.
And if it backs away from people like Starmer and increasingly Friedrich Merz and Macron and others.
Who want to use it as a tool for helping them build up their military, something they should have done 20 years ago.
You're talking about the Austria or the Swiss model.
Swiss is probably not a good example because they've been neutral for a thousand years, but the Austrian model would be a good example to compare, would it not?
Yes, it would.
I've heard Colonel McGregor talk about that.
It would be a good model.
Well, is Trump abandoning Europe?
No, I don't think so.
I think he wants to establish a good relationship with Moscow, and Europe is in between.
And ultimately, there's going to have to be a new European security architecture.
And I would contend, as a military professional and as a citizen, that it needs to include Russia.
Well, you know, if this grand reset results in Russia returning to...
The G7 and making it the G8, which it once was before Joe Biden, that would be a remarkable step toward the normalization of relations and the use of commercial activity and trading involving China,
Russia, the United States, India, and Brazil.
We couldn't have imagined that two years ago, but that may actually happen now.
Well, it would have been a lot better move, a riposte, if you will, to this inexorable shift of power to the East.
You re-establish or refurbish the instruments of your power as an empire and otherwise, and your connections to the world economically, financially, militarily, and otherwise, you refurbish them at the same time you accommodate this shift of power.
The shift of power is inexorable.
You're not going to keep power from slowly eroding from the West, and Europe's just making this happen faster, and going to the East, where the magnet China is drawing it.
You have 1 in 5 on the Earth is Chinese, 1 in 5 is Indian, 3 in 5 is Asian.
70% of the world's GDP is there.
You cannot stop this shift of power, but you can accommodate it.
It is a multi-nodal world, as Ambassador Freeman likes to say, not multipolar, multi-nodal, because that suggests nodes instead of poles.
And that's what it is.
And I'm afraid the empire is going to have to get used to that.
Biden started fighting that tooth and nail.
Actually, Bill Clinton started fighting it tooth and nail.
That's what the expansion of NATO was all about.
And it was a huge strategic mistake.
We need to...
Recognize that mistake and back up and create a new mechanism for accommodating this shift in power.
Not that it means that China is all powerful.
It just means that that's where most of the money people and industry is.
Look at what they just did with these new batteries, for example.
Holy mackerel.
Let's accommodate them.
Let's work with them.
Let's work with Taiwan.
Let's work with China.
Let's work with all the countries.
Colonel, from your lips to Donald Trump's ears, although for all of his wrongheaded decisions on Gaza and on civil liberties, I think he is with us on this.
I think he dreams of opening up markets to foreign markets to Americans and vice versa.
I hope you're right.
I hope you're right.
Colonel, thank you very much, my dear friend.
Always a pleasure.
Congratulations on the new and more youthful look.
Thank you for joining us.
We'll see you again next week.
Take care.
Nurse that girl.
Okay.
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