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May 19, 2025 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
29:12
LtCOL. Karen Kwiatkowski : Is Trump in Netanyahu’s Pocket?
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Hey everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
Today is Tuesday, May 20th, 2025.
Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski is here with us on Is Donald Trump in the Pocket of Benjamin Netanyahu?
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Colonel Kwiatkowski, welcome here, my dear friend.
I do want to talk to you about your opinions on whether Trump tells Netanyahu what to do or Netanyahu tells Trump what to do.
Who knows?
But first, some other items that are bubbling around in the news.
About three or four weeks ago, Two senior CIA officials released the result of an extensive study about whether the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua was affiliated with and subject to the commands of the Venezuelan government, and their conclusion was that it was not.
Last week, they got fired by Tulsi Gabbard for coming to a conclusion at odds with the administration's narrative.
Then over the weekend, two days ago, without citing any evidence, Vice President, or excuse me, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on national television that Trundale Aragua was affiliated with, financed by, and subject to the government of Venezuela.
Sometimes I think I preferred Congresswoman Gabbard.
To Director of National Intelligence, Gabbard.
But of what value is intel if the result can be preordained by the politicians?
Yeah, it's of no value.
In fact, the only thing of value apparently is the leaks, whatever gets shared with the public so we can at least have some idea of what we're paying for.
Yeah, clearly not much has changed since even I was in the...
Pentagon, all those years ago, two decades ago, when we were pumping out lies.
But the real intelligence was pretty good, but it wasn't politically useful, and so they just made up stuff to be politically useful.
And really, I think it's a rationale for not just cutting...
The Pentagon budget, but certainly cutting the intelligence budget drastically.
Because we spend, I mean, I'm not sure what the CIA's black budget is, but there's a lot spent on the CIA.
The DOD spends a lot on intelligence.
And yet, what good is it?
What good is it?
Because when it produces information that's factual.
But politically inconvenient, it is buried, and the people apparently doing it are fired.
So in the case of this Trendy Aragua thing, which will make its way into court, and someone will have to certify to it under oath because it involves the use of this Alien Enemies Act.
And a federal judge in Texas, appointed by President Trump in his first term, analyzed all this and relied on the intelligence report.
To conclude that Trende Aragua is not subject to the government of Venezuela.
And by the way, Venezuela is not an enemy.
It's not at war with the United States.
So who would rely on what Tulsi Gabbard did or Marco Rubio said?
Nobody.
The courts are not going to rely on it if it can change on a political whim like that.
Yeah.
Thank goodness that we have the court system, even though it seems to take its time to work through.
And, you know, a lot of times the cases and the records of the court, that's the only information that the Americans really can get.
And we still have to often get that through for you.
But we have information that is correct and constitutional in many ways.
So thank goodness for that.
But, no, it's very disappointing.
Gabbard is...
I think a lot of us had a lot of high hopes for her.
She was a good congresswoman and an outspoken peace voice, a voice for peace and a voice for a realistic foreign policy.
Yeah, we're not getting that from her, though.
We're not getting that.
Right, right, right.
The Trump-Putin phone call.
Do you think the American mindset, whether it's the American firsters in America firsters in Trump's administration or even the neocons, understand the Russian mindset?
A, they're not going to engage in a ceasefire just to negotiate.
They'll negotiate while the war is going on.
That's their history.
And B, their demands to end this war have been clear.
And consistent since before the war started.
They're not going to change now when they're on the cusp of demolishing the Ukrainian military?
Yeah, no, that's true.
I think Trump may be figuring that out.
He has spoken to him repeatedly.
And I think the message that the Russians are giving has been consistent.
It's been consistent for over three years.
And I think it's getting to Trump.
I think he realizes that.
And plus, what would be the alternative to not allowing the Russians to resolve the problem as the SMO was designed to do?
And that is not quite done yet.
What would an alternative be?
That the SMO modifies its objectives?
Or if they don't, then Trump somehow is going to send the army in there?
Are we going to engage with Russia directly over...
An argument where Russia has been right from day one, and we have been wrong from day one.
I think Trump understands that.
You know, Russia knows, the Kremlin knows, Ukraine was armed not by NATO, but by the United States during Trump's first term.
McGregor keeps saying, Ritter keeps saying, you've said, we are not a neutral here.
We are a co-belligerent.
That's right.
The weapons that they fired that didn't get anywhere near there because the Russians shot them down at Red Square to ruin the May 8th celebration were made in the United States of America.
You can't make this up.
Yeah.
I don't know.
I think Trump is coming to the realization that this fight, that he's almost believing his own rhetoric, that this is Biden's war.
Not entirely, but this is Biden's war and he's going to leave it as Biden's war.
He's going to end it or withdraw from it and let it go.
And I think that suits Trump in his overall range of projects that he has going on.
But I don't know if he truly understands.
Again, Trump doesn't, you know, what does he know about any particular history or foundation of these conflicts around the world that we, the United States, have fomented and been involved with from day one?
What does he really understand about those?
And I don't know.
So I don't know how much he's learned.
What troubles me is the in one ear and out the other.
One day, Sebastian Gorka is in his ear.
The next day, Steve Witkoff is in his ear.
One day, Marco Rubio is in his ear.
The next day, J.D. Vance is in his ear.
I don't know what...
Gabbard tells him, I don't know if she's collapsed to the point where she'd do whatever she thinks he wants so that she keeps her job or if she's intellectually honest with him.
But here's Zelensky yesterday.
I mean, this is really crazy.
They won't give up an inch of land.
Chris, cut number three.
Nobody will withdraw our forces from our territories.
It is my constitutional duty, the duty of our military, To protect the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine.
Yes, there are temporarily occupied territories now because of the aggression of such a huge country.
It is understood.
But we will accept no ultimatums.
We will not give away our land, our territories, and our people, our homes.
He is saying that to keep the super-nationalists around him from killing him or removing him from office?
Or do you think he's saying that because somehow he truly believes it?
How on earth could they win back the 4-0 blasts that they've nearly lost and Crimea?
No, there's no way.
And his soldiers, his troops that remain there, the ones that Russia wants them to withdraw.
They have two choices.
They can be told politically.
Selensky can tell them to withdraw and they can pull back.
Or they will be destroyed.
It's that simple.
And the people on the ground, his troops know this.
His troops know this.
So he's out of touch with the reality of his country, but he's not out of touch with the people around him that will kill him.
So I think it has to be the survival thing.
You know, he has an echo chamber in the EU and in NATO.
So those folks who hug him and embrace him still, they tell him, oh, hang in there.
You can do this.
Hang in there.
So Europe is at fault here in a great deal for supporting his fantasy.
And it is a fantasy, and it's not a fantasy in a good way.
It's a nightmare, really, for what's left of Ukraine.
So, I mean, it's not bad for those in the Russian Donbass.
They're doing much better.
But for the Ukraine proper, its very future as a state is at risk.
And this is pretty much what the Russians have been saying.
You know, if you want a state, if you want to maintain yourself as an entity, then you need to realize you need to wake up.
And do what it takes to have that state, a neutral state, a non-nuclear state, a non-NATO state, a contained state.
Like the very wealthy, happy, and prosperous Switzerland or the very wealthy, happy, and prosperous no-military Austria.
Absolutely.
What's wrong with those models?
Not at all.
And I really think we have got to start.
We have got to start.
The world has got to start valuing neutrality, valuing peace.
Because I don't know, I guess, you know, you make money in wars and you can cut a lot of deals and it's all good for some people.
But peace is the path to prosperity.
It's the only path to prosperity.
So we need to start valuing that.
And Ukraine as a neutral state could have been and could be perhaps such a wonderful place.
I mean, it has ties east and west.
It has some resources.
Obviously, it's going to be smaller than it was before.
As a neutral, non-militarized country, friends with everyone, taking the Thomas Jefferson approach, What a wonderful place it could be.
Unfortunately, he's surrounded by people who will probably eliminate him from the planet or certainly eliminate him from any vestige of government power if he gets realistic.
Here's Trump as recently as yesterday.
It's very frustrating to watch this, Colonel.
Not my war.
It's not my war.
I'm just here This was not my war.
This is not a war that would have happened if I were president.
This is not my war.
I'm just here to try and help.
We've spent hundreds of billions of dollars on this war.
And yet, that's not...
Frankly, we made much more than that just in four days in the Middle East.
It's a lot of money, but we do much.
This is about thousands of people dying every single week.
5,000, 6,000 people dying every single week.
You know, these soldiers, they say goodbye in Ukraine and in Russia, and then their parents never see them again, except maybe in pictures of...
Horrible scenes, because I've seen some scenes.
I've never seen anything like it.
So we're going to see if we can get it taken care of.
Yeah.
Thousand Ukrainian soldiers die a week and he's been president for 12 weeks.
That's 60,000 deaths under his watch, but he's just there to help.
It's not his war.
I don't know how much longer he can say that with a straight face.
Not much longer.
Not much longer.
And he could have stopped this at any time.
He continued.
He could have impounded the funds and stopped sending weapons.
He's even increased some certain types of weapons, or at least promised them to Ukraine.
And the same goes for Israel's war on Gaza.
We are funding that war.
That's also his war that he's paying for with our money.
We did not get consulted about that.
But yeah, these are American wars.
I like that Trump is engaging with Russia.
This is good.
Biden did nothing of the sort.
And I like that Trump is traveling around and talking to a lot of people and cutting deals.
But he's got to take responsibility.
And he really, truly should recognize his own power as president to stop funding these wars.
If it's Biden's war, why are you paying for it?
And he is paying for it.
Here he is.
Yesterday, again, in which a reporter says to him, did you ask President Putin to meet with you?
Listen to the first two words that he responds with, and then, of course, he elaborates.
I don't mean to pick on him at all, but these responses of his are priceless.
Cut number 11. Did you ask President Putin to meet with you?
About what?
About Ukraine.
Of course I did.
I talked to him about it.
I said, when are we going to end this, Vladimir?
I know him for a long time now.
I said, when are we going to end this bloodshed, this bloodbath?
It's a bloodbath.
And I do believe he wants to end it.
You know, when I made the call, I told the people last night, I spoke to the heads of the different countries, Germany and Finland.
We had Italy, as you know, and the UK was on the line today, and a couple of others.
And then they were, in turn, calling everyone.
Ursula was there from the European Union.
Union, she was terrific.
And we, you know, we spoke for a long time about it.
And they got a problem.
It's a big, big problem.
It's a terrible war.
It's very hard to extradite themselves away from what's taking place over there.
The amount of anger, the amount of hate, and the amount of death.
It's very hard.
Very tough situation.
But I said to him, we've got to get going.
And I did say also, if I thought that you couldn't do it, I'd step away because what are you going to do?
It's as if he's some sort of a neutral bystander and not the financier, the supplier, the producer of the war.
Yeah.
And it's worse than that, really, because we are pressuring NATO, have been for decades.
I mean, the whole idea of NATO is that that is a forward American operating space.
We want them to use our equipment if we can.
We demand that they have any equipment they make is interoperable with ours.
We sell them, I mean, billions and billions of dollars of arms.
So we want NATO to, as a market, to grow, to purchase more, to do more, to need more.
That's our market planning, see, for Europe.
And we want them to buy more gas.
You know, we are connected with the European economy.
And that wartime economy is the one that can't extricate itself from Ukraine.
Doesn't want to, because there was a lot of money being made with that.
There was a lot of hopes for a future, larger NATO.
I mean, obviously, this is the crux of the problem.
They wanted to expand NATO to surround Russia with it.
Bad idea.
But people make money when they do that.
And Trump likes to make money.
He thinks the country is like...
You know, he sees the country much as a large business that's looking to expand markets.
And so he can talk about the bloodshed.
Well, that's the result.
That's what you get, okay, when you militarize unnecessarily and look for wars where no wars need to happen.
That's what you get, okay?
You get bloodshed.
So Trump acts like he's surprised.
Well, you know, it's really sad we want to stop that.
Really?
Because you need to understand why it's happening.
Powerful president.
He's willing to act.
But is he willing to think and understand?
Well, is he willing to think and understand in Gaza, Karen?
The UN High Commissioner for Humanitarian Affairs, a British fellow named Tom Fletcher, last night said that 57 Gazan babies died of malnutrition last week.
I inadvertently said 5,000.
I was wrong and I stand corrected.
57. Gazan babies died of malnutrition last week, and 14,000 are starving and will die in the next 48 hours.
And Steve Witkoff says the president is a humanitarian.
Why doesn't somebody do something about this?
Is Trump in Beebe's pocket or is Beebe in his?
Good question.
I think Trump...
Whether he's in Bibi's personal pocket or not, I think Trump certainly has been taken in by years, not weeks or months, but years of Israeli propaganda about what goes on in Israel.
So is the U.S. Congress.
I mean, this is the spewing of false information by AIPAC, by AIPAC-supported media, certainly to some extent by Israeli media, although...
The president would be very wise to actually read Israeli media because they actually talk about these things and to some extent debate them.
Yeah, he is poorly, poorly informed.
And so if you're going to be a humanitarian, that's a real thing.
That's life and death.
That's starvation versus non-starvation.
And he's not educated in the reality.
So how can he possibly...
Be a humanitarian.
And also, this business about I'm the most powerful president in the world, which all the presidents of America say this.
How would we know that?
Because really, he is still Bibi Netanyahu's right-hand man in the slaughter.
Because we're arming them.
We are not ceasing to arm them.
We are saying, oh, we're going to bring food, but...
It's all going to be delivered according and in coordination with the Israeli desires.
And the Israeli desires, Netanyahu's and most of the government, most of the population, their desires are that more babies will starve to death in 48 hours.
57 is not enough.
It should be 5,700.
57,000 would not bother them.
This is an extermination.
So Trump and the word humanitarian do not belong together.
And he's already passed the opportunity to do something about it.
When Steve Whitcock first began negotiating with the Iranians, he came away and said, we're very close to a deal.
We're going to allow nuclear enrichment below a certain level so that it's only useful for civilian purposes, primarily energy and hospital uses.
And then the neocons got to Trump.
And he said no enrichment at all, which he knows is a non-starter.
Here he is with Jonathan Karl on This Week on ABC News on Sunday, two days ago.
Chris, cut number five.
Can you give us a sense of what is the outline of the deal that President Trump wants to get with Iran?
He wants to solve this conflict diplomatically and with dialogue.
But on the other hand, we have...
One very, very clear red line, and that is enrichment.
We cannot allow even 1% of an enrichment capability.
We've delivered a proposal to the Iranians that we think addresses some of this without disrespecting them.
And so that's important.
We want to get to a solution here, and we think that we will be able to.
But everything begins from our standpoint, John, with a deal that does not include enrichment.
We cannot have that, because enrichment enables weaponization, and we will not allow a bomb to get here.
But short of that, there are all kinds of ways for us to achieve our goals in this negotiation.
We think that we will be meeting sometime this week in Europe.
And we hope that it will lead to some real positivity.
And that's where we are, sir.
You know, I don't think Witkoff's naive, but they know that that is a non-starter zero enrichment.
It's like Zelensky saying, we want Crimea back.
These things are just not negotiable.
They'll be resolved.
With the force of arms, but not with negotiation.
That's right.
You know, when Trump just got back from Saudi Arabia and they were talking about helping Saudi Arabia generate up a nuclear energy industry of some sort.
I think, you know, there was some talk about Saudi Arabia having the possibility of, you know, working with uranium.
And, of course, we know...
Israel has 400 nukes, plus or minus, maybe more.
They've got submarines.
They've got the whole thing.
And their whole security concept is we will have nukes, but no one around us will have anything to defend themselves.
I mean, I think the icon of this was how they, on the day after the fall of Assad, they used three days to completely destroy the entire military infrastructure and weapons stash.
That Syria had.
They completely wiped it out.
This is how they view national security, and that's warped, okay?
That's extremely warped.
It's just, it's not workable.
It's not right.
It's not sustainable.
It's not just, and it's not going to happen.
Back to the slaughter in Gaza, the United Kingdom, for what it's worth.
I don't know how much they trade with Israel, announced the suspension of trade.
I'm not sure if he's Foreign Secretary or Defence Secretary David LeMay on the floor of the House of Commons earlier today.
As the Prime Minister and fellow leaders said yesterday, we cannot stand by in the face of this new deterioration.
It is incompatible with the principles that underpin our bilateral relationship.
Rejected by members across this House.
And frankly, it's an affront to the values of the British people.
Therefore, today, I'm announcing that we have suspended negotiations with this Israeli government on a new trade, free trade agreement.
We will be reviewing cooperation with them under the 2030 bilateral roadmap.
The Netanyahu's government's actions have made this necessary.
I say now to the people of Israel, we want, I want a strong friendship with you based on shared values, with flourishing ties between our people and societies.
We are unwavering in our commitment to your security and to your future, to countering the very real threat from Iran.
The scourge of terrorism and the evils of antisemitism.
But the conduct of the war in Gaza is damaging our relationship with your government.
And as the Prime Minister has said, if Israel pursues this military offensive as it has threatened, failing to ensure the unhindered provision of aid, we will take further action in response.
Listen, I'm not a fan of the British government at all, but I couldn't imagine Marco Rubio or Pete Hegseth saying that.
Could you?
No.
I couldn't even imagine anybody on the floor of Congress, maybe Thomas Massey, arguing for it.
Yeah, no, it's to their credit that he is standing up and doing that, but it's not to his credit that it took, you know, 600 days of genocide and a war that's...
Unbalanced, aggressive, aimed at full retaliation to the whole population, men, women, and children.
This has been going on for over 550 days, nearly 600 now.
For him to come up now, I'm glad that they did.
It is a little too late.
I saw a meme the other day, and it said the Brits and Europeans saying to Israel, Really, you're embarrassing us.
You know, if you wouldn't embarrass us with your genocide, we would continue to support you.
But it's not that they're morally opposed to it, but they don't want to be politically embarrassed because the country, their people, the British people, Europeans, people around the world are enraged by what they're seeing.
And these politicians are so, so slow to react to really the morality of the majority in this case, which is very, very strange, but they don't want that.
Colonel Kwiatkowski, a pleasure, my dear friend, no matter what we're talking about.
Thanks for letting me pick that very fertile brain of yours.
We'll look forward to seeing you next week.
Thanks a lot, Judge.
Okay, all the best to you.
Tomorrow, Wednesday, a very busy and happy day for you.
At 8 o 'clock in the morning, Professor Gilbert Doctorow.
At 11 in the morning, Aaron Maté.
At 1 o 'clock in the afternoon, I don't know where he is, but wherever he is, it'll be midnight.
Pepe Escobar.
At 2 o 'clock, returning here.
After an absence of a couple of months, my dear friend Matthew Ho at 3 o 'clock, Phil Giraldi, and at 4 o 'clock, the always worth waiting for, Scott Ritter.
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