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May 7, 2025 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
31:08
Prof. Jeffrey Sachs : Can the Kremlin Trust Trump?
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Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
Today is Wednesday, May 7th, 2025.
Professor Jeffrey Sachs will be with us in just a moment to discuss whether the Kremlin can trust President Donald Trump.
But first this.
I'll tell you a sad truth.
Also a little surprising.
And I have to admit...
What I'm about to tell you is only 99% sure.
But my view, based on very extensive work over the last four and a half years, is that COVID came from the University of North Carolina,
which is the leading researcher on beta coronaviruses, A set of grant proposals that identified putting in the viral change that created SARS-CoV-2.
It's a grim truth.
It's ugly.
It's been hidden from view.
The reason I mention it in this context is we don't have any global governance that is effective right now to control the manipulation of dangerous pathogens.
Like the manipulation that created the pandemic.
And when it happened, and officially it took 7 million deaths, but probably, if you count all of the deaths associated with COVID, it was probably closer to 20 million deaths.
Even when that happens, it's never properly investigated.
It's covered up.
Professor Sachs, welcome here.
Did Dr. Fauci lie under oath and did the United States government hide material information from the public during and following the COVID pandemic?
Yes and yes, and until today.
Even at the beginning of the pandemic, the insiders understood.
That this was most likely from the lab.
In fact, of course, NIH, and that means Fauci, funded the research that most likely caused this virus.
They knew that as early as late January 2020.
They knew it on a call on February 1st, 2020, which subsequently came to light because of the Freedom of Information Act release.
There's been a lot of lying and a lot of fraud.
Now it's pretty much said by the US government, well, yes, it was a lab leak, but from China, but not telling the key part, which is that it was most likely created in the United States, maybe tested in China, maybe accidentally released in China, but most likely created by...
NIH grants in the United States, at least with a substantial amount of US funding and investment of whatever happened.
And insiders understand this, but this has been hidden from view during the whole period.
And we could find out a lot more.
By investigating U.S. laboratories, University of North Carolina being a primary case, Rocky Mountain Laboratory of the National Institutes of Health being a second case where the evidence has not come to light.
The research is not known whether the CIA or FBI or others have Investigated this is also not known to us in the public, but there's been no systematic report of what should be understood.
Professor Sachs, you are alleging a vast conspiracy.
How many people were involved in this?
How many people know or knew this at the time and kept it from the president and kept it from the public?
Well, dozens of people, because the virology community around Fauci, around NIH, had very clear reasons for suspicion, and those reasons for suspicion have only increased from the start.
There are aspects of the virus in the genetic code that are kind of a signature.
To point the way that this is a laboratory-created virus.
Of course, it's a natural virus in the essence, but then with changes that are made.
And there are a couple of changes that are kind of signature changes that even point to the authorship.
And this is known among a relatively small group of people.
In 2021, a whistleblower in the U.S. government posted a very important document on the Defense Department website of a grant proposal that described the work that probably created this virus.
The response is, "Oh, that work wasn't funded by the Defense Department after all.
It was just a proposal." But there's good reason to believe that the work in fact was funded by a group of NIH contracts because the principal investigators of the grant that was posted on the Department of Defense website in fact were funded in 2018 and 2019 by the National Institutes of Health.
There's a lot more circumstantial evidence that's extremely important.
Some of these pieces have been put together by a House investigative committee.
Some are well understood by Senator Rand Paul and his office because he's been very assiduous in pushing forward the investigation.
But there's a large part that is either not properly investigated yet or has been looked at and hidden from view to the public about the U.S. role in all of this.
And the U.S. role is very substantial, without doubt, in the science, in the intention of modification of the virus, and most likely in the creation of the virus.
Are there any good guys in this story, and where can you expect it to proceed from here?
I mean, you shared with me a very lengthy, detailed, complex summary of the research, which is filled with scientific statements and scientific terminology.
Well, it will get in the hands of the World Health Organization at a minimum.
It should get in the hands of U.S. authorities because...
What I shared is known public information.
And many, many studies now that have pointed, again, I'd say 99%.
There is missing information for sure.
Lab notebooks, electronic files, emails, and so forth around the critical period.
At UNC, at Rocky Mountain Lab, and others that should urgently be looked into.
Maybe they have been.
Maybe they've been expunged.
Maybe people do know.
I don't know.
I don't have any knowledge of or interest in classified information.
I know what I see publicly, and what you see publicly is the signature of a manipulated virus.
Linked to publicly known NIH grants and with a lot of forensic evidence, if I can put it that way.
By that I mean behavioral evidence of how these people behaved that we know of because of brave reporters on The Intercept and other places that have pursued the Freedom of Information Act.
Against the secrecy of the U.S. government.
Let's be clear.
The U.S. government, under any interpretation, and this is 100%, not 99%, has covered up what is known about this virus.
What the ultimate answer is, is still with some uncertainty, but the cover-up of critical information is absolutely indisputable.
Shockingly fraudulent papers, I think it's the only way to put it.
Do you have any information about whether Presidents Biden and Trump are aware of this?
I don't personally know.
They should be.
It's not secret stuff.
It's just not discussed.
And what they should be doing...
Is not pointing the finger to China and why doesn't China tell us this and that.
What they should be doing is investigating what happened right here in the United States.
Because this is available to the U.S. government, to the legal authorities, to the FBI, to people who need to be investigating this.
There is, for example, there have been Freedom of Information Act.
Lawsuits for University of North Carolina to release emails in the critical period, and they've refused to do so.
Well, this is something the U.S. government should be actively pursuing.
Switching gears, Professor, and with deep gratitude for your extraordinary work in this field as well as in geopolitics, can we realistically expect I'm optimistic.
I was in Moscow.
I had a chance to speak with the officials as well.
They are optimistic as well that there is a real possibility.
Of course, what's happened is President Trump has made some very correct statements.
About the origins of the war and the reasons that the war continued and uselessly continued.
So he's on the right track and presumably he's being well advised on that by Mr. Whitcoff.
But around the Western alliance, if you could call it that, is all of the pushback of the deep state.
We had a statement.
By President Biden, apparently, I didn't see the details, saying that this is appeasement.
Shame if President Biden said this.
He was disastrous in his mismanagement of relations with Russia that led to this war.
So shame if he's talking about appeasement because he made terrible, terrible blunders and his team was awful.
But we're also hearing statements that make no sense from the British.
I never expect better, unfortunately, because they live in a fantasy world of a past empire.
We're not hearing sensible things from France and from Germany when we need to, which is that there is a way to end this war now.
It's not about appeasement.
It's about stopping the mass deaths and the risk of nuclear war that continue in Ukraine.
Because of what was a 30-year, absolutely wrong-headed campaign by the United States, principally, with allies in Europe to push American military bases up to Russian borders and to try to weaken or actually break apart Russia.
This was a long-term plan, spelled out, again, in detail, Judge.
Because if you know where to look, you can find all of this laid out from the earliest days of 1993, 1997, 2008, 2014.
This is a long-term plan.
President Trump is trying to end this terrible idea, which has led probably to more than a million Ukrainian deaths or gravely wounded.
Huge numbers of deaths and wounded every day.
He's sensibly trying to end this.
But then we have the continued hardliners.
So that's where the real uncertainty comes from, is the deep state.
We are taking a poll of those who are watching now, and it's a huge number of people in what we call the chat room.
It's a very simple question.
Can Putin trust Trump?
So if you're watching now, I encourage you to answer yes or no.
We'll reveal the answer while Professor Sachs is still on air with us.
So I don't know if you saw this because of your travels, but here's what President Trump said on Sunday morning.
I guess it was actually taped a day or two before that on Meet the Press about how much of Ukraine President Putin wants to capture.
Chris, cut number 10. Ukraine, there's been discussions they will have to give up some of the land.
Russia will have to give up all of Ukraine.
Because that's what they want.
All of Ukraine?
Meaning they wouldn't keep any of the land that they've claimed?
Russia would have to give up all of Ukraine.
Because what Russia wants is all of Ukraine.
And if I didn't get involved, they would be fighting right now for all of Ukraine.
Russia doesn't want the strip that they have now.
Russia wants all of Ukraine.
And if it weren't me, they would keep going.
How to get a handle on that.
I don't know if it's ignorance, lobbying by the people you've just been talking about, the neocons that planned and plotted this going back to the 90s, or if it's some sort of a political maneuver.
He knows how this is going to end and he'll take credit for the parts of Ukraine that did not become Russia.
How do you explain this?
Let me give an interpretation that, I'm not sure, but let me give an interpretation that may be what President Trump is saying.
What I think is true, and maybe this is what he means, if there is no peace, Russia will continue to advance in Ukraine and it will continue to take more territory.
I tried to claim Odessa and other areas.
It said if there's no peace, it's not going to settle for the Ukrainian regime as it is today, which Russia regards, understandably, as completely Russophobic and ready to strike inside Russia and so forth.
So what President Trump may be saying, not to us, but to the Ukrainians, is, look, Either you take what I am putting on the table, which is you keep your sovereignty,
you keep your state, but you acknowledge some territorial change because that is the reality of the battlefield after these three years of war, or you risk losing everything.
I think the message, if I understand it, that President Trump was saying in that interview was to the Ukrainians.
He's very frustrated.
Zelensky is totally recklessly irresponsible, which he can be by virtue of the fact that he rules with martial law.
But does he have a sort of Damocles over his head held by the fanatical nationalists that surround him?
Oh, I would think so.
You know, I would think that maybe he's playing his own game of personal survival or personal power or other very personal ideas.
But he's got millions and millions of people depending on the decision to end the war.
And his point is, no, I'm not going to end anything.
Territory, irrespective of what has happened during the last 11 years now.
Because remember, contrary to the American propaganda, which is repeated endlessly, this war started in February 2014.
It did not start in February 2022.
There's a long history to it.
Ukraine had several off-ramps where it would have kept all of its territory.
Then after the coup which brought this Ukrainian regime to power, a coup where the United States played a decisive role in February 2014, the Russian government took back Crimea before it fell into NATO hands, which was the intention.
But Ukraine would not have lost any territory in eastern Ukraine.
What happened was a peace agreement was signed called the Minsk-2 agreement.
There were two of them, so the Minsk-2 agreement was the main one.
In 2015, voted unanimously by the UN Security Council, which did not give any territory in the Donbas to Russia.
It just required Ukraine under the terms of the agreement.
To give autonomy to the ethnic Russian population of eastern Ukraine.
And the Ukrainians and the Americans decided, no, we're not even doing that.
We're not going to honor an agreement.
As late as 2021, when I spoke with President Biden's national security advisor, and I begged them, avoid this war.
Russia was not making...
Any territorial demands in the Donbas.
In April 2022, and we've discussed this, an agreement was about to be signed between Russia and Ukraine that the United States stopped.
And that agreement was a little bit ambiguous as to territories, but basically implementing Minsk II as late as April 2022 would have avoided the loss of territory.
Well, NATO went to war with Russia full speed for three years, and Russia has won on the battlefield.
And now Ukraine, to this day, Zelensky is saying, no, we demand everything.
And he's killing his countrymen as a result of that.
They're literally being dragged off the streets, you know, delivery boys on bicycles, being pulled off their bicycles, put in vans.
Put in uniform, sent to the front line to their deaths.
That's our ally in this.
President Trump is trying to stop this.
Why doesn't he just turn off the spigot of arms and intelligence?
That'd stop it in two weeks.
He absolutely should.
This is the right policy.
We should be done with this.
But I think what he was trying to say in that interview to Zelensky was, you'll lose everything.
If you continue on the line that you're continuing because the U.S. has no interest in your maximalist position, which is just going to get more people killed, isn't going to succeed, is going to prolong the war, and no thank you from the U.S. side.
So the question we put to everybody, can Putin trust Trump?
We had over 1,500 responses.
90% said yes, Putin can trust Trump.
10% said no.
How do you think, and you know him personally, I just met him for a few hours, Foreign Minister Lavrov responded when he saw that Meet the Press interview?
Because there's not a scintilla of evidence.
I understand that maybe the audience was not Russia or the United States, but there's not a scintilla of evidence that this is what Putin wants.
I mean, this almost sounds like Emmanuel Macron saying to Latvia's I think the Russian view is they're going to continue the war unless there is a peace agreement.
And they are hoping...
That President Trump is, and they're thankful that President Trump is trying to end the war, something that Biden never did, never even tried.
So they're thankful for that.
They believe in their discussions, from what I've heard from senior officials, that they found their discussions with President Trump's representative, Mr. Whitcoff.
To be very forthright, straightforward, and encouraging.
I don't think they do somersaults over this, though, I have to say, because the Russian view of this, which is so different from how our mainstream media treats this, is that the United States doesn't follow through, so they're not going to...
They're not going to jump up and down believing that everything is solved.
After all, the Minsk II agreement could have ended this war that started in February 2014 and could have ended it a decade ago.
President Biden had countless off-ramps, which he chose not to take.
Deep state approach for more than 30 years was we can defeat Russia, bring Russia to its knees, even break apart Russia.
This is a not well-kept secret of the actual aims of the US.
And, of course, it's proven to be fantasy and disastrous for Ukraine, first and foremost.
Whatever Zelensky's actual motives are, whether they're personal, political, the sword of Damocles over his head, his policy is a disaster for his country and does not reflect Ukrainian desires for peace.
Does not reflect Ukrainian desires for peace.
This is a small clique which rules by martial law.
They won't test themselves at the election polls.
They claim you can't do that in a war, but of course you can do that in a war.
The United States has done that repeatedly, even the Civil War and in the World Wars.
Of course you can have elections during wars, but they don't want to test themselves.
this is a clique ruling by martial law.
All right, so apparently...
There was an error in the communication to me, and I apologize for it on this poll.
It was the opposite of what I have read.
No.
It was 90% of our viewers who are a Jeff Sachs, Douglas McGregor, Scott Ritter, John Mearsheimer pro-peace audience.
90% say...
Let me put it this way for everybody watching.
President Trump has said something very Trump-ish, Trump-like.
He said, I don't want to play Biden's failing hand.
You know, our leaders tend to view things like a poker game.
And Trump...
He says, this is not my hand.
This is not my war.
Obama, well, that's when Crimea was taken by Russia.
That's not my story.
This war that I inherited didn't happen on my watch.
It happened on Biden's watch, who didn't do anything about it.
My feeling is that Donald Trump...
Just does not want to play a losing hand.
And there's an old observation.
Professor Sachs, his administration armed the Ukrainians dramatically during his first term.
This is now his war.
Well, it is becoming his war as the months go on.
And the right thing to do, in my view, is to...
State the case for peace, and if that peace is not accepted by the parties to have the United States play no further role in this war, of course, to stand ready to help with the peace, but not to provide another cent of financial support, not another bullet, another artillery shell, nothing.
This is not our war.
It should never have been our war.
I warn the Ukrainians, don't listen to the United States.
Don't listen to Biden.
Don't listen to all the U.S. promises.
They don't work.
This was the old point of Kissinger.
To be an enemy of the United States is dangerous.
To be a friend is fatal.
So don't listen to this.
Now, Zelensky, if he's going to continue the war, By the way, continue the war as one-person rule, not in this vaunted democratic way that our newspapers talk about.
There's nothing democratic about Ukraine right now.
This is martial law, and let the public have its say on war or peace if it's democratic.
But if they're going to continue this war, don't do it with our support.
That's my feeling.
Professor Sachs, thank you very much.
We've been all over the place, from North Carolina to Kiev.
Great to take the tour with you.
I've got to say this on a personal basis, because we've become such friends, even though I'm such a fan of yours.
It's a credit to your remarkable intellect and incredible energy that you, one of the foremost authorities in geopolitics, took the time to do all the research on COVID.
and produced a result that the American public should know about as unhappy as that result is.
I personally think Thank you, Professor Sachs.
Thank you so much.
We'll see you again soon.
I don't know where you're going next, but safe travels.
Thank you.
We'll see you next week.
Of course.
And a word of thanks to all of you.
I obviously read that result incorrectly.
And as Chris, the producer, said, Judge.
The chat room is going wild, and you did, and we corrected ourselves.
Ninety percent of you, of the thousands that weighed in, are of the view that the Russians will not trust President Trump, and 10 percent say they will.
Thank you for weighing in.
Thank you for watching.
Coming up next at one o 'clock today, the former British diplomat Ian Proud.
What is going on in Europe?
At 2 o 'clock today, our friend Aaron Maté, what is NATO preparing to do when the U.S. leaves it?
And at 3 o 'clock today, Phil Giraldi, what is the Israeli government controlling here in the U.S. now?
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