All Episodes
Previous Next
April 16, 2025 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
23:06
[ SURPRISE WAITING ] - Phil Giraldi : A Week in the Twilight Zone.
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hi, everyone.
Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
Today is Wednesday, April 16th, 2025.
Phil Giraldi joins us now.
Phil, always a pleasure.
You have an interesting piece out this week.
All your pieces are interesting at the UNS Review called Another Week in the Twilight Zone.
So let me nibble around that as we get to the reason for which you chose that phrase.
Are the neocons in Trump's crew now becoming ascendant?
Do you get that feeling?
Yeah, but I would qualify it a little bit by saying that they have exploited a situation where they have basically a leader in Trump who is very ignorant on most issues.
Very weak in the sense that he's driven by his own sense of worth, his narcissism, where he thinks he's a genius and he thinks he has everything figured out.
They've taken advantage of all that to basically, I think, be in some measure steering the ship as long as they kind of maintain the fiction that he's...
He's completely in charge and he's the genius behind what is happening today.
So it's kind of one of those mixed personnel type things.
And we saw the same thing in the first time when Trump was president where he made very bad choices and these choices like Bolton tended to dominate the policies that were coming out because they They were,
to a certain extent, able to fool the leader.
Do you think that people like Lindsey Graham and Marco Rubio and Pete Hegseth and Mike Waltz want the war in Ukraine to continue and wish that Witkoff has no success?
Yeah, I think that you have to realize the neocons, we tend to focus on their issues in the Middle East.
But the neocon doctrine, which was, of course, developed and refined in the 1990s, essentially is a world domination doctrine.
And that's why there's the continuing Which I find so unfounded, hatred for China, hatred for Russia, these are seen as competitors in the sense that they diminish or minimize the possibility that the United States will continue as the world-dominant hegemon.
And, of course, there are reasons why that ain't going to continue, which have been very well spelled out by a lot of your friends on this program.
So we will see how that plays out.
I'm very interested in seeing in the next month what happens vis-à-vis Ukraine and what happens vis-à-vis Gaza, but also you have to be looking at what's going to happen in Yemen, where they're talking of a ground invasion now.
Here's one of the most beautiful articulations against American hegemony.
I won't have to tell you who this is or when it was.
You'll know in a heartbeat.
Chris, cut number 17. And we must face the fact that the United States is neither omnipotent nor omniscient.
That we are only 6% of the world's population and that we cannot impose our will upon the other 94% of mankind.
That we cannot right every wrong or reverse each adversity, and that therefore there cannot be an American solution to every world problem.
And of course, we know what happened to him.
Well, that's right.
That's certainly one of the things that I recall when I was an undergraduate at the University of Chicago.
Well, we were discussing the fact that Kennedy might have been done, in part because he was not on board of the Hegemony Railroad.
And there were signs, of course, that he was very lukewarm, particularly about Vietnam.
So all these things kind of came together and came together with the problem with Israel, Israel's nuclear arsenal.
There were a whole lot of people that really would like to have seen and finally did see John F. Kennedy go away.
Yeah. By the way, you mentioned your undergraduate years at the University of Chicago.
When you were there, was Leo Strauss on the faculty?
No, Strauss was, well, he was still kind of off the screen.
But you talk about the foundations of neoconism.
I mean, that's right up his alley.
Yeah, and he was the one, of course, who educated the next generation of neocons.
Many of them, of course, who were at Chicago, and many of them went on to where his apostles were in Baltimore.
So it was a developed philosophy at that time.
And there were a lot of the acolytes being trained at that time.
I had no contact with them.
Thanks be to God.
Why did Trump withdraw from the JCPOA?
And what was the JCPOA?
Which Ritter rues Trump having withdrawn from.
Yeah, the JCPOA was the Joint Comprehensive Proposal for Action, which was basically a multi-nation agreement to do what was necessary to monitor Iranian nuclear developments to make sure they were not creeping into the weapons phase.
So it was well designed.
It operated for a short time and was very effective.
The Iranians allowed inspectors to go into all their facilities.
It was clear that they were not cheating.
But somehow, someone named Mr. Bolton, I believe it was, got to a guy that was just elected president and was completely ignorant in the form of Donald Trump and convinced him that the Iranians were cheating.
And, of course, the Israelis were singing the same song.
And so he basically pulled out of the program under the conviction that there was a secret nuclear weapons program.
And, of course, now we've noted that the CIA, at least certainly for 20 years, has known that Iran had no such thing.
And that's in spite of very intensive spying to uncover it, if it were true.
So again, it was a fraud, and it was a fraud that was sold to Donald Trump, so he withdrew the United States from the program, and it basically collapsed.
Wouldn't the CIA have told him, or wouldn't he have had to have rejected their advice to do this?
Wouldn't they have told him, no, there's nothing going on there?
Or was this the era where they told him what they thought he wanted to hear?
Well, maybe it's a little bit of both, but I would add another element to it.
There have been a couple of presidents that I certainly have been told by my former colleagues inside the agency were not interested in the president's daily brief.
Bill Clinton was one of them.
And Donald Trump also was rarely interested in being...
Sat down in an office and briefed about what was going on in the intelligence world.
He was more interested in talking to the people with which he had a great deal of empathy.
And those were the ones who were trying to steer him in a certain direction.
I'm going to play a clip and then ask you some questions about it.
But before I play it, I'm going to tell you what Colonel McGregor said about this person and this statement on this show yesterday when he said, if you hire a clown, you get
a circus.
Cut number nine.
*laughter*
He's dead serious that Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon.
He's said that.
For 20 years, he's been consistent.
That is clear.
But he's also dead serious that if we can't figure this out at the negotiating table, then there are other options to include my department to ensure that Iran never has a nuclear bomb.
We hope we never get there.
We really do, Maria.
But what we're doing with the Houthis and what we're doing in the region, we've shown a capability to go far, to go deep, and to go big.
And again, we don't want to do that.
But if we have to, we will to prevent the nuclear bomb in Iran's hands.
Maria should have said, hey, Pete, how is it that the Israelis have a nuclear weapon?
What would he have said?
Yeah, she should have said that.
But of course, nobody ever says that.
That's part of the problem.
But of course, it's not as simple as he's portraying it.
Basically, he's saying we will go to war if Iran is developing a nuclear weapon.
But here we have our intelligence services telling us that they ain't.
And so it's a bit of a dilemma.
And then meanwhile, we have Bibi Netanyahu pounding on his desk and insisting that a Libyan solution has to be arrived at.
Now, a Libyan, if you think back what happened to Libya after Gaddafi was killed, the country was basically stripped of its weapons by NATO.
With the United States and Britain and France in the lead.
And that's what we have now calling for.
Saying it's not enough just to, you know, take away their nuclear weapon.
It's necessary to take away everything they have.
And that means going into the country with US troops in the lead and stripping their armaments.
And taking away their industrial capabilities to make more weapons and to basically make them not sovereign anymore and not able to defend themselves.
That's what Netanyahu wants.
So we'll see maybe in the next month or so, or maybe even sooner, which way this is going to go.
Here is former Congressman Kurt Weldon.
You may know him.
Libya, cut number 16. We were the ones that caused Qaddafi's death because Hillary Clinton played a game over there.
And I was the one that went over there during the war.
Qaddafi asked me to come over.
I took a Biden staffer and a Bush staffer and a film crew leader from ABC1 in New York, Larry Mintz and a cameraman because I didn't want the CIA to set me up.
I hand-carried the letter back from Qaddafi offering to resign.
The U.S. didn't want him to resign.
They wanted to kill him.
That was Congressman Weldon on the Tucker Carlson show.
We used an AI voiceover in order to avoid copyright issues, even though Tucker's a friend.
We didn't want to get involved in any of that.
But does that make sense to you, what he just said?
Yeah. I think basically that...
Well, first of all, there were economic motives that were behind a lot of what happened in Libya in terms of Libya's energy reserves.
And I know in particular, I was in Europe at that time, and of course, the Italians and others were very keen on getting a hold of that stuff.
So yeah, they wanted him out.
They wanted him dead.
And that was the raison d'etre for a lot of things that happened.
And of course, Countries like Israel, who saw Libya as an enemy.
Libya had indeed been very active in its role of pan-Arabism in opposition to Israel.
They wanted the country reduced to basically what it's become now.
It had been the richest and most prosperous country in Africa, and now it's at the bottom of the list.
ICE, the Immigration Customs Enforcement entity, what does Max Blumenthal call it, the Israel Censorship Enforcement, recently posted on X that its job is to impede the movement of illegal ideas,
and then that post was taken down.
Under the American Constitution, isn't an illegal idea inconceivable?
Well, according to the Constitution, yes, but according to the Biden and our current government, there is a...
An evil aspect of criticizing one thing, which is basically Israel.
And by extension, the groups and the policies and the constituencies that have put Israel in that position.
You can't talk about that.
Just like you can't talk about...
U.S. government employees cannot talk about Israel's nuclear arsenal, even though it's well-attested, well-known.
I'm sorry, my phone is ringing in the back.
It'll stop in a second.
Well, at least it's nice music in the ring.
Go ahead, Phil.
I know, kind of not music.
Right. So anyway, yeah, it's that kind of story.
And we'll see how it plays out again.
This stuff is all on a knife's edge right now.
What is your view of the relationship of Russia and China to Iran?
Do you think they'll sit back?
If Netanyahu talks Trump into attacking, I mean, McGregor has told us that, well, you know what, I'm going to play what McGregor told you.
He didn't tell us.
He told a colleague of ours, whom you know, Danny Davis.
Chris, play that clip, please.
What nation on the planet can have their embassy destroyed in another country and to have an assassination in their capital city on an inauguration and not go to war with somebody?
Yet that's exactly what Iran didn't do because they don't have the power to do it.
So that should tell you...
Wait a minute.
Wait a minute.
That's a fundamentally false statement.
Which part?
False, false, false.
They don't have the power to go to war?
You haven't looked carefully at Iran.
Iran's arsenal of missiles is enormous.
It could flatten Israel in a day.
They have the power to go to war.
They have chosen repeatedly to avoid war.
And I've said this a thousand times.
No one in the Middle East is interested in a war except Israel and the United States.
Agreed. Yeah, I mean, that's absolutely correct.
McGregor is correct.
Davis, as usual, is off-key.
And that was a correct assessment.
Iran has a considerable capability.
And it has that...
I hesitate to call it an alliance with China and Russia, but it's an arrangement.
And they would certainly be supporting Iran.
They would not...
They wouldn't actively be on the battlefield or anything like that, but they would be supporting in as many different ways as they can.
If only, now we're talking about US staging an attack, because Israel's not going to do it, and they want us to die, they want us to spend our money, and if the US were to do it, both China and Russia see now that There's probably not going to be any good relations down the road with the U.S. for either country.
So they would want to be weakening the United States by supporting countries like Iran, which are in the front line in terms of going against U.S. policy.
So if Netanyahu attacks Iran and we back him up, or if Netanyahu talks Trump into attacking Iran, Witkoff can pack it in.
Yeah. We're not going to be invited for five-hour meetings with Putin in Moscow anymore.
Yeah, the game will be over in many different ways.
That's the thing that's so perplexing about the Trump administration, and it was true about Biden, too.
The fact is they don't see what happens the day after.
They don't see that when you start attacking people who don't threaten you, you're not at war with.
That other countries will take note of that.
And they're going to make things difficult for you in every way, shape, or form that they possibly can.
And that's why the United States should disengage from all these things and basically start talking.
But I don't see that coming out of what has been happening in the last couple of weeks.
Why did you call events in the United States in the past week the Twilight Zone?
Yeah, well, the Twilight Zone was the title of the article, and I went through four or five different scenarios that had recently occurred, all of which negatively impact on the United States and on the viability of the United States and on what's going to happen to us American citizens.
One of them that particularly irritated me was, of course, this whole business of deportation where they're now seriously talking in the White House and presumably in other areas within the government and within the administration about American citizens being exported.
And Donald Trump came out with that ridiculous metaphor that he always comes out with about these bad people.
Who are pushing people in front of subways and banging old ladies over the head.
And these people have to be exported to places like El Salvador and put in mass prisons.
These are American citizens born by birth in American citizens.
And he's talking about doing that to them.
This is so scary.
I would take that the media and others would be going out of their minds, but of course they're not.
No, they're not.
And it is terrifying that heretofore rational, well-meaning people are defending the abuse of free speech rights and defending the rejection of due process rights.
Right before we came on air, a federal judge commenced contempt proceedings against the Trump administration because of its willful failure to follow his orders and its willful failure to explain to him what they did or didn't do to comply with the orders.
I don't know how this ends up.
But the Trump administration, in my view, is playing with fire.
I don't mean that playing with fire by playing with federal judges.
I mean playing with fire by its reckless abandonment of the values of America that the Constitution was written to protect and that everybody in the government has sworn to uphold.
Yeah, sworn to uphold it.
But the message they're sending is quite the opposite, which is that...
They don't have to pay any attention to what a federal judge says.
And they've been repeating that over and over again.
And again, take a look at the Constitution.
Take a look at the history that lies behind the Constitution, the wrongs that the Constitution intended to fix.
And these people are throwing all that out the window.
It's beyond scary.
Phil Giraldi, always a pleasure, my dear friend.
Rupert hasn't moved an inch between you speaking to me.
He's turning his head.
All right, there he is.
He heard me use his name.
A pleasure, Phil.
Thank you for joining us.
Okay, thank you for having me on.
All right, let me just look up what we have tomorrow.
Tomorrow, at 8 in the morning, Professor Gilbert Doctorow...
At 2 in the afternoon, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson.
At 3 in the afternoon, Professor John Mearsheimer.
And sometime during the day, Max Blumenthal.
▲
Export Selection