All Episodes
Previous Next
April 21, 2025 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
21:44
Aaron Maté : Is Ukraine Now Trump’s War?
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hi, everyone.
Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
Today is Tuesday, April 22, 2025.
Aaron Maté joins us now.
Aaron, thanks very much for your time, as always.
Aaron, is Ukraine now Donald Trump's war?
Absolutely. He's been talking recently about how this is Biden's war, and there's a lot of truth to that.
Joe Biden has been all over this Ukraine proxy war project from the start, dating back to 2014.
But Biden's out of office now.
And Donald Trump is the president.
And it's his choice whether he wants to continue it or not.
And I don't think he wants to personally continue it, but he's facing forces from within.
He's got people like Keith Kellogg and Marco Rubio whispering in his ear.
They don't want to be the ones to make a deal with Russia and be accused of what's called appeasement in Washington, which simply just means diplomacy and brokering some kind of compromise.
So it's up to Trump now to decide what he wants to do.
And although I think ultimately...
He will not go before Congress to ask for more money for the Ukraine proxy war.
And a source close to the White House recently told me that there's no chance of him doing that.
How he actually gets to ending the war, I think, is still being considered because he doesn't seem to have his full weight behind it at this point.
Chris, run the clip of Trump saying it's Biden's war.
Cut number 16. Do you have a reaction to Russia's poem Sunday attack?
I think it was terrible, and I was told they made a mistake.
But I think it's a horrible thing.
I think the whole war is a horrible thing.
I think the war is, for that war to have started is an abuse of power.
You said they made a mistake.
You were told they made a mistake.
You mean it was unintentional?
They made a mistake.
I believe it was.
Look, you're going to ask them.
This is Biden's war.
This is not my war.
I've been here for a very short period of time.
This is a war that was under Biden.
He gave him billions and billions of dollars.
He should have never allowed.
If he had any brain, which he didn't have and doesn't have, and now it's being proven, he wouldn't have allowed that war to start.
I would have absolutely not.
That war would never have taken place.
But remember this.
This is Biden's war.
I'm just trying to get it stopped so that we can save a lot of lives.
They happen to be Ukrainian and Russian lives.
But all I want to do is get it stopped.
He must have said four times that it was Biden's war.
We all know the history.
You pointed it out.
It was back to 2014.
But he has been in office for 100 days.
He does not appear to have turned off.
We know he hasn't turned off.
He hasn't even dialed back the spigot.
He stopped Intel for about five days, but now Intel is back advising the Ukrainians where to hit.
Are General Cavoli's people still?
That's a great question.
I suspect now Kavoli has handed off some authority to his NATO allies so that they can continue this operation because without NATO support, Ukraine is extremely, extremely jeopardized.
I mean, they're already in trouble to begin with.
So there must be a way that this is continuing with possibly a lesser role for...
But the question is, again, first of all, what is Russia willing to accept at this point?
They've talked about Istanbul+.
There was a deal on the table three years ago now, three years ago this month, that was brokered by Ukrainian and Russian officials in Istanbul.
We all know what happened.
Zelenskyy walked away from that under pressure from the UK and US.
And now Russia is demanding Istanbul +, that Ukraine recognize the territories.
That Russia now claims as its own, beyond just Crimea, which was Russia's main demand back in April 2022.
Now there's basically a number, there's several more regions, Zaporozhye among them.
And so, well, if Trump can get Ukraine to basically accept that, is Russia going to accept just a deal that addresses Ukraine?
Or is Russia going to also press its demands about a broader security arrangement in which...
NATO rolls back its military assets that threatens Russia.
For example, Russia wanted to address Trump's own dissolution of the INF Treaty, which allows for the US to point high-powered, long-range...
I don't see Trump walking that back, though.
I don't see Trump going back on his own decision to kill the INF Treaty.
And so is Russia going to be content with basically a deal that cedes control of some formerly Ukrainian regions and puts NATO's membership in Ukraine permanently off the table?
I suspect they would, but we'll only know once.
These negotiations play out.
And there's supposed to be a new decision from Ukraine this week as to whether or not the recently proposed U.S. term.
So basically, a lot of things are still in play.
But is the U.S. making any progress in negotiations?
And is the only issue just Russia's demands?
Crimea, the four oblasts, no NATO, and a new government in Ukraine?
Or is it, you know, a big reset?
Which might take Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin in the same room to bring about.
Yeah, I just don't see Trump agreeing to a big reset, given that it was some of his own policies that he had to undo, including walking away from the INF Treaty.
He's also talking recently about spending a trillion dollars on the Pentagon budget, initially talking about cutting the Pentagon budget in half.
So if that's where he's going, they're going to need enemies like Russia to justify such a massive...
So I don't think a big reset is likely.
But I do think we will see Trump walking away from the U.S. role in the proxy war.
Again, I spoke to a source recently, it's close to several White House officials, who is extremely confident that there will be no new Trump request for money for the Ukraine proxy war.
And when that money runs out, it's anyone's guess, I suspect it's the summertime.
At that point...
Where's Ukraine going to go?
Because Europe, despite all its tough talk, can't make up for the U.S. when it comes to weapons and intelligence.
You wrote recently about Trump's disdain and mockery for a Ukrainian request for a Patriot missile system.
But did he send it anyway?
Well, there have...
Been continued weapons deliveries from the U.S. to Ukraine.
As to this latest Patriot request, I don't know, actually.
I don't think so.
Unless you've heard something different.
Well, I mean, I don't know.
I mean, he was very Trumpian.
You quoted this in your article.
Why do you start a war with somebody 20 times your size and then expect other people to help you?
It's a little late in the day, but he's the type of person to say that, get it off his chest, and then say to Hegseth, or send it over there anyway.
We don't know if this stuff was...
And then Hegseth will tell his wife and his gardener what he's sending over.
I haven't heard any news of them actually granting Ukraine's request.
And by the way, when he talks about this is Biden's war and we spent billions of dollars fueling it, well, why doesn't he apply that also to the Gaza genocide?
Which also was Biden's war, because Biden gave Israel the green light to commit mass murder, and Trump is continuing that policy.
You can also apply that to the Gaza war as well.
Yeah, I mean, that's the issue of the tail wagging the dog, if you're talking about Netanyahu.
What is your take on the Pete Hegseth stuff lately?
Seems like it's more than just a one-off simple...
Yes, it's hard to know what's going on because there definitely seems to be, I mean, first of all, Pete Hegseth himself, I mean, we all have our, it's pretty clear that he's not qualified for the job.
I mean, when you have spent, you know, with all due respect to former Fox News host, judge.
I don't think he's qualified to be the Secretary of Defense.
It seems like his main qualification was that Trump liked him on TV and sees him as a loyalist, which is not, I think, sufficient grounds to be hired to head the Pentagon.
But there does seem to be some sort of infighting inside the Trump camp.
And I don't know where Pete Hegseth falls in that.
I mean, we do know recently from the New York Times that Pete Hegseth was among the officials, along with Tulsi Gabbard and J.D. Vance, who were opposed.
So then, with Pete Hegseth being targeted with media leaks, I have to wonder if this is a part of that.
I'm not saying it is for sure, but I have to raise that question.
And we know recently that there were some officials fired from the Pentagon who are opposed to war with Iran, including Dan Caldwell, who gave an interview to Tucker Carlson recently, basically saying that he was fired for opposing war with Iran.
So there's some factional infighting going on.
If Pete Hegseth is being targeted, I'm saying, I don't know this for sure, but if he's being targeted because he's not in the hawkish bomb Iran camp, then I have to be skeptical of all this controversy surrounding him, as admittedly unqualified as he is.
Here's a very interesting take on that controversy.
I don't know if you know this fellow.
I don't.
Although I've obviously seen the clip we're going to run.
His name is Brian Tyler Cohen.
And he's a podcaster, so this is somewhat serious and somewhat ridiculous about Pete Hegseth.
Chris, cut number eight.
See, this is what the media does.
They take anonymous sources from disgruntled former employees, and then they try to slash and burn people and ruin their reputations.
Not going to work with me.
Yep. Not gonna work with him.
And this is where I actually agree with the Secretary of Defense.
It is appalling when members of the media try and slash and burn patriotic Americans simply for mishandling some classified information.
Right, Mr. Hegseth?
If the top man in the job was to handle classified documents this flippantly for that long, why was that the case?
Was it really that he didn't know?
Because when you take something out of a skiff, if you're a senator, you know exactly what you're doing.
Any security professional, military, government or otherwise, would be fired on the spot for this type of conduct and criminally prosecuted for being so reckless with this kind of information.
Oh no!
First the Pope is dead and now hypocrisy!
Why? So the man who is widely criticized as unqualified has shown himself to be...
Just that.
Seriously, this is the guy that we're keeping around?
Apparently, to be the Secretary of Defense, the person in charge of a proposed trillion-dollar budget, and the largest military in the world.
All you need to be is a white guy with a nice head of hair and some broadcasting experience.
I'm coming for you, Pete.
I don't know the guy.
I guess he's a humorist, but he certainly makes his point.
He does.
There's a ton of hypocrisy to go around here, as the clip pointed out.
People like Peter Hegseth made a huge issue out of Democrats when they mishandled classified information, namely Hillary Clinton's email server.
And yeah, discussing war plans on a Signal chat is certainly...
Had Hillary Clinton done that...
Her Republican detractors would have had a field day.
So there's a lot of hypocrisy.
And Pete Hegseth, you know, his defense is, well, the media lies all the time and they carried out the Russia hoax.
And that's true.
And because the Russia hoax was such a scam, I do think that will offer people like Pete Hegseth a shield of protection.
Because unfortunately, because of the scale of fraud that it took to pull off Russiagate, a lot of people just don't trust established media anymore and won't take their...
Outrage about hypocrisy and the signal gate controversy very seriously.
And so that's why I do think the second term Trump team is more protected against media so-called scandals than they were in their first term.
Interesting observation.
I thought when the New York Times reported that Hegseth sided with Vance and Gabbard.
And advised Trump not to bomb Iran.
I thought, gee, this is not the heck, Seth, I know.
Maybe there's another side to him, a very desirable side.
And then three people were fired, and I thought, oh, he didn't want the world to know of this side of him, because it's not that macho Donald Trump, let's kill the other side side.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. It's hard to know what's going on inside this White House.
What we do know is that there are competing camps on all these issues.
On Ukraine as well, Keith Kellogg, Marco Rubio, Mike Waltz.
I mean, these are career hawks, and it's not as if they had some epiphany and realized they wanted to be peacemakers all of a sudden.
Why is Kellogg still there after that nonsensical, let's divide Ukraine up like the Allies did Germany after World War II?
I mean, that's inconceivable that Putin would go for that.
Why does he even put it out there?
It's a great question.
Especially given that Trump is delegating his friend Steve Wyckoff to do the jobs that everyone else is supposed to have.
I mean, Marco Rubio is supposed to be the Secretary of State, yet Steve Wyckoff is both meeting with Vladimir Putin and then jetting off to meet with the Foreign Minister of Iran.
So why is anybody else there if Steve Wyckoff is the one handling all these different portfolios?
It's a little chaotic.
So, listen, great question.
I don't know why Keith Kellogg is still there, but I think we can safely say that he's not doing very much.
Here's a clip from former Vice President Al Gore.
It's only about two hours old and it's going viral already.
He's addressing a climate group, but he's going after Trump for his assault on civil liberties.
Number 15. The scale and scope of the ongoing attacks on liberty are literally unprecedented.
Use what is not a precedent.
I understand very well why it is wrong to compare Adolf Hitler's Third Reich to any other movement.
It was uniquely evil, full stop.
I get it.
But there are important lessons from the history of that emergent evil, and here is one that I regard as essential.
In the immediate aftermath of World War II, a small group of philosophers who had escaped Hitler's murderous regime returned To Germany and performed a kind of moral autopsy on the Third Reich.
The most famous of the so-called Frankfurt School of Philosophers was a man named Jürgen Habermas, best known, I would say.
But it was Habermas' mentor, Theodor Adorno, who wrote that the first step in that nation's descent into hell was, and I quote, The conversion of all questions of truth into questions of power.
He described how the Nazis, and I quote again, attacked the very heart of the distinction between true and false.
Our Constitution, written by our founders, is intended to protect us against a threat identical to Donald Trump.
Someone who seeks power at all costs to get more power.
Well, Harvard University is listening to him.
He's a graduate of Harvard.
By the way, the lead defendant in the Harvard University case, the lead defendant is also a graduate of Harvard, RFK Jr.
I guess he's just a nominal defendant since he actually disperses a lot of the funds.
Are we getting to the point where we take for granted, or as Al Gore argued, Who cares about due process?
We're getting rid of bad people.
Whatever Trump wants to do, is the sensitivity for due process slipping out of our hands?
Well, there has been more Democratic Party pushback against the denial of due process to undocumented immigrants than there has been to Trump's cracking down on free speech.
And so I do think, and also the Supreme Court, We'll be weighing on cases like this, and judges have already weighed against Trump on the issue of due process.
So personally, I'm not alarmed at that being in fatal jeopardy.
I am about free speech, though, where foreign students can be basically kidnapped and imprisoned and deported because they write op-eds critical of Israel.
That, to me, is the more serious danger.
As, for example, we're seeing now...
The Trump administration pressed ahead with its deportation cases.
Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia student, his wife just gave birth, and his legal team petitioned immigration enforcement to let him just be released on a probationary basis, just to be there for the birth of his child, with monitors and ankle monitoring,
all that stuff.
And within half an hour, the request was denied.
So the Trump administration is going to extreme lengths to punish people for free speech, foreigners.
So that's the major assault on civil liberties that I'm most concerned about.
Not that this due process issue isn't a serious issue.
It is.
But you are seeing at least Democrats push back on that more forcefully.
Senator Chris Van Hollen going to El Salvador to press the case.
And more Democrats, I think, are following suit.
But the free speech issue, that's not something...
We can take for granted anymore.
The U.S. really stands apart historically in its protection of free speech, and that is under assault.
Maybe because I'm too close to the Russiagate issue because I covered it for so long, Democrats have responsibility for this as well because Democrats helped normalize a culture where people who hold dissenting perspectives on Cold War conflict with Russia...
We're smeared as Russian agents.
And people, foreign nationals, people like Maria Butina, who's a foreign national, she was jailed for a very, very long time in this country simply because basically she had a Russian passport.
And the government needed her to make it look as if Russia was interfering in our politics.
So someone like Maria Butina spent a long time in prison for being an unregistered foreign agent when really that case was just ridiculous.
So I'm not excusing what Trump is doing.
I think he's taking it to a new extreme.
Democrats have been a part of that as well, and I think it would help contribute to the culture of civility and some sort of reconciliation in this country.
If Democrats could finally acknowledge that they framed Trump as a Russian agent, and there are a lot of negative consequences of that, because we're still dealing with the polarization that has resulted from that.
You talk about unregistered foreign agents.
I'm going to guess that you are aware of this woman that Mike Waltz just hired to run the Israel-Iran desk at the National Security Council.
She has joint American-Israeli citizenship, and she's a former official of the Israeli Defense Ministry.
I mean, this is really...
Why isn't this lady a foreign agent?
That's a great question.
As I understand it, her position is advisory, so she helps advise them what the policy toward Iran and Israel should be.
But what is she going to recommend when AIPAC and other Israel lobbyists funnel their proposals, their agenda, through the National Security Council and she gets their proposals?
Is she going to reject them, having formerly worked with the Israeli Foreign Ministry?
Of course not.
So you might as well hire the Israeli Foreign Minister to work.
In the U.S. government, if you're going to be hiring former Israeli officials and Israeli colleagues like she is to set policy.
It's a joke.
And again, if someone...
Unfortunately, Democrats, they're so obsessed with Russia fear-mongering that if someone ran a comparative position inside the U.S. government having worked for Russia, of course, this would be a massive scandal.
Because it's Israel.
So far, really, it's passed without much attention.
Aaron, thank you very much for your time, my dear friend.
Much appreciated.
We look forward to seeing you next week.
All the best.
Thanks, Judge.
Thanks for having me.
Of course.
Coming up at 3 o'clock on all of these topics, especially the Al Gore topic, and particularly, do we still have a functioning democracy?
▲
Export Selection