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June 15, 2025 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
33:46
Scott Ritter : Analysis of Israel/Iran War.
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Hi, everyone.
Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
Today is Monday, June 16, 2025.
Scott Ritter will be here in a moment, but first this.
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Scott Ritter, welcome here, my friend.
I have a lot of questions for you about what's going on between Israel and Iran.
But before we do, I was just thinking about this a few seconds ago.
I thought I'd ask you big picture.
As a man, as an American, as a patriot, as a Marine, how do you feel about all of this and the prospect of American troops in harm's way over this?
Well, I have made it clear in the past I love my country and I'm willing to die for my country.
I'm often very critical of the policies of the various governments that run my country.
And I am ashamed of the current administration.
I don't know if people know this, but I reluctantly voted for Donald Trump in November because of the options available.
was an ardent supporter of him for the first hundred days, giving him a chance to fulfill the various promises he had made to the American people, foremost of which is that he was a president of peace.
And as somebody who has gone to war for my country and understands the cost that people pay, you know, when we go to war and realizing that We owe it to the men and women who honor us by their service to ensure that before we send them to war, we exhaust every means possible short of war to resolve the various issues that could lead us to war.
I was taken by this man, Donald Trump's repeated assertions that he was a president of peace, that he wanted to get us out of the endless cycle of war, that he would seek an end to the conflict between Ukraine and Russia.
He hasn't been able to end the conflict between Ukraine and Russia because he doesn't know anything about Russia, and it doesn't seem that he wants to know anything about Russia.
I don't know if you're aware of this, Judge, but the State Department today announced They are not continuing the dialogue with Russia to normalize relations.
So not only has he not stopped the conflict with Russia, he's now ending the dialogue that gave us the possibility of peace with Russia.
This is crazy.
He claims he had an amicable birthday greeting conversation with President Putin on Saturday.
Yeah.
Again, the inconsistencies of this man.
That's the topic for psychologists and others to discuss.
It's above my pay grade.
Joe Biden would be right on this one.
But, you know, the one that's even more disturbing is this is a man who said he wanted to end the cycle of endless wars in the Middle East, wars that he rightfully said cost us trillions of dollars, cost us thousands of lives and got us nothing.
This is a man who said he was looking for.
And yet here we are with Israel.
Having launched a Pearl Harbor-type sneak attack against Iran, I want to remind everybody that Israel has no foundation in international law whatsoever that can be cognizable or articulated responsibly to justify what they've done.
It's an absolute violation of international law, and yet here we are condoning it and facilitating it, and it appears that this president was in on the game, that he used this process of negotiation to lull the Iranians.
Iranians into a false sense of complacency that they honestly believe that this man wanted a deal and they were ready to give him a deal.
Mr. Shamkani, one of the closest advisors to the supreme leader and one of the negotiators in this process, had said days before this surprise attack that Iran was ready.
To sign a document, an agreement, a treaty that they would not seek nuclear weapons.
They were ready to do this.
They were ready to lower, limit their enrichment to 3.75%.
That's what's needed for the existing Boucher air nuclear power reactors.
That they were ready to allow inspections inclusive of American inspector participation.
Unprecedented.
Unprecedented.
They were willing to do anything the United States and the international community needed done to show that they weren't pursuing nuclear weapons.
And this president led the Iranians in Shamkani to believe that that's the path he was taking.
And yet all along, he was lulling them into a false sense of safety and security.
And he laughed, bragged, was proud of the fact that when Israel attacked, he helped set it up.
Shamkani was killed in this attack, along with all the other negotiators.
Trump killed the damn Iranian negotiating team.
Now, who the hell is going to trust?
I don't.
And no American should.
That speech that he gave in Saudi Arabia, which we praised, he condemned neocons.
He condemned Western military adventurism in the Middle East and said he was the president of peace.
It was a lie, a deception, and a plot.
100%.
This isn't just about lulling the Iranian.
He did it to the American people.
This man is a disgrace, a walking disgrace.
He doesn't deserve the respect of the American people.
I'm somebody who said he's the commander-in-chief.
We have to support this guy.
Ladies and gentlemen, he's going to get us involved in a war.
I just want to show you how serious this is.
I've had conversations with very senior Russian officials who are in on the thinking inside Moscow.
Russia has made it clear that they will not be the first nation ever to use tactical nuclear weapons.
That's not in their game.
They're not going to do it.
But once tactical nuclear weapons are used, especially by the United States, all bets are off.
If we drop a nuke on Iran, Russia will drop nukes on Europe.
That's a guaranteed outcome.
A guaranteed outcome.
This is how stupid this man is.
This is how stupid his advisors are.
There are smart people out there who know Russia, who understand nonproliferation, who understand the reality of nuclear weapons, and he's not talking to any of them.
Instead, he has a...
He has, you know, Marco Rubio, who's just apparently, you know, has fantasies about going to war with Russia, with Iran, with everybody, China, advising him not just as a secretary of state, but as the national security advisor, dual-hatted in a role that is unconstitutional as it is unfathomable.
Donald Trump is a...
He's a straight-up liar, a straight-up liar who can never again be trusted and never should again be given the benefit of the doubt.
Do you think that Netanyahu has boxed him in, or do you think that he was in on all of this from the beginning, and that everything that we're seeing has been planned, with the possible exception of the ferocity of the Iranian response, about which I will ask you more in a little bit?
That all of this was planned.
That I don't know.
I don't know.
Because, again, the way he did this, I fundamentally think that Donald Trump is a coward and a morally weak man.
And what I mean by that is he gets led around and influenced by people.
He doesn't stand for anything.
He doesn't have a core of steel.
He's not the great leader that everyone makes him out to be.
He's a fundamentally weak man who may in his heart of hearts believe that he wants peace, but is unable to deliver because he can't stand up to people when they stand up to him.
So there's a possibility that some of the things he said he believed at the time he said it.
But as we get close to closing the deal, this is the deal maker, the greatest businessman the world has ever seen.
He sucks because he can't close the deal of peace.
And therefore he gets manipulated.
And that's what's happening here.
He is being led down a path to the destruction of the United States of America because he's not strong enough to stand up and defend the very principles he articulated when he ran for president.
Principles premised on peace, avoiding conflict, seeking out normalization of relations.
These are difficult paths.
Real men could do it.
Real women could do it.
He's not a real man.
He's a coward.
He's an intellectual, moral coward who can't finish the job.
He can't close the deal.
And this is where we're at.
Here he is, about a minute long in Saudi Arabia, reading what somebody else wrote for him, but leading the whole world to believe that this is what he meant.
Before our eyes, a new generation of leaders is transcending the ancient conflicts of...
This great transformation has not come from Western intervention.
The gleaming marvels of Riyadh and Abu Dhabi were not created by the so-called nation-builders, neocons, or liberal non-profits like those who spent trillions and trillions of dollars failing to develop.
Kabul, Baghdad, so many other cities.
Instead, the birth of a modern Middle East has been brought by the people of the region themselves.
In the end, the so-called nation builders wrecked far more nations than they built, and the interventionalists were We're intervening in complex societies that they did not even understand themselves.
They told you how to do it, but they had no idea how to do it themselves.
Peace, prosperity and progress ultimately came not from a radical rejection of your heritage, but rather from embracing your national traditions and embracing that same heritage that you love so dearly.
He didn't mean a word of that.
He didn't understand a word of it.
Cabal.
It's Kabul, you idiot.
Not you, Judge, the president.
Interventional lists.
He doesn't even understand.
Somebody wrote this.
I don't even think he rehearsed it.
I don't think he went through it with a pen.
And it's okay to have people write stuff for you.
All presidents do it.
I mean, you're a busy man.
You sit there and give your vision, and then you have the wordsmiths come out and put out beautiful words.
But this is something that was fed to him through a teleprompter that he hadn't reviewed.
You know, cabal?
Come on.
That just means he doesn't even know what he's talking about.
And everything he said there is a lie.
This was a setup.
This is part of the setup.
This trip was designed to lull people into a false sense of security, of complacency, because he gave that speech, I just want to point out, within the 60-day window that he had already created with Netanyahu to prepare for the Pearl Harbor event.
Donald Trump is a war criminal par excellence.
He helped facilitate a Pearl Harbor type event.
And for any American on December 7th who lowers their head and remembers that horrible day, a day of infamy, when we were attacked in a treacherous manner by Imperial Japan, we have just become that which we condemn.
We suck.
We suck collectively because we're, I mean, I understand we had no king demonstration.
What about the people that should stand up for peace?
The people who say, this will not stand.
Where is the anti-war movement?
They're non-existent, Judge.
They're non-existent.
Is Israel's so-called Iron Dome effectively insulating it from the retaliation by Iran?
No.
Iran is devastating Israel.
This is part of a concerted campaign approach taken by Iran.
Look at the port of Haifa.
It's gone.
Look at Ben-Gurion Airport.
Gone.
Look at the gas facility in Haifa.
Gone.
Look at other targets in Israel.
Gone.
Israel won't even allow us to see what they're doing to the airfields and such.
There's a reason why the Israeli Air Force is deploying to British bases on Cyprus, because they can't survive on their own airfields here in Israel.
And it's just going to get worse.
This, you know, hundreds of billions of dollars of U.S. taxpayer money that were spent, you know, building this Iron Dome and then additionally reinforcing it with American-only resources, the FAD missile system, the Aegis system that is located on ships that are deployed in the region, the U.S. satellite network, everything that, you know, that we've built into our ballistic missile defense organization.
It is not working.
Oh, yes, they intercept a couple things here and there.
I mean, they better.
You spent that much money, you better do something.
But most of what they're intercepting is designed to be intercepted, meaning that the Iranians are firing missiles that are 20 years old, 30 years old in some cases, that have been upgraded with decoy capacity.
You fire these things, they deliberately bloom to attract the defense systems, and while all the defense systems swarm around them, the good stuff comes in and hits the target.
Eventually, they're going to run out of missiles.
The rumor is they're very low on THAAD missiles, and we don't have any left to give them.
You know, if you're the Indo-Pacific commander, if you're the commander of the Pacific fleet right now, and you're saying, hey, boss, all this aggressive stuff that you have us doing against China, you know, could lead to a conflict, you're literally using up...
They've diverted the Nimitz, which is a South China Sea asset, and its battle group there.
It's going to deplete its SM-3s and SM-6s.
What are we going to defend Taiwan with?
Nothing.
Nothing.
We have nothing.
And plus, it doesn't work.
And, you know, the president just sat there and briefed us about Golden Dome.
$175 billion within three years.
We're going to have this beautiful Golden Dome.
The technology doesn't exist.
The technology they're relying upon doesn't work.
And the proof is look at Israel right now.
Whatever they produce in Golden Dome simply won't work.
And it won't cost $175 billion.
It's going to take decades to put in place.
And even when we put in place, the price tags are going to be upwards of $4 to $40 trillion by the time it's done.
And it won't work.
So, again, this president's an idiot who sits there and buys into whatever nonsense is fed to him, and the Israeli people are paying the price right now.
And I don't know if there's too much sympathy around there for people now to cry, oh my God, look what they've done to us.
Hey guys, right across the border is Gaza.
That's what you've been doing, uh, you know, for the last, The fact that the Israelis have suffered as much damage as they've done and they still have less than 20 dead speaks volumes of the accuracy of the Iranian missiles and what they're targeting.
As opposed to the Israelis who are indiscriminately attacking Iran.
They just took out a building last night.
26 children together with their families.
Over 60 people killed.
You don't hear anybody Condemning that action.
I mean, come on, the Israelis are literally the most...
It's the most immoral army in the world.
These are treacherous people who carried out a Pearl Harbor event with no justification whatsoever.
The Israelis know the Iranians don't have a nuclear weapons program.
They know it.
This is all manufactured data by the Israelis.
And, you know...
The complicity between Israel and the International Atomic Energy Agency, which manifested today in the Iranians saying we're done with the IAEA.
They didn't say we're getting out of the NPT yet, Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, but we're done with working with the IAEA inspectors because it has now been proven that they were more than an intelligence collection platform feeding data back to nuclear.
Israel could not have done the precision targeting that they have done here.
Most of it ineffective, by the way.
But to hit specific points on the ground, you can't do unless you have somebody on the ground determining what that specific point is.
And that was the IAEA inspectors, who were then also caught red-handed doing battle damage assessment.
That is, looking at the damage that was done, feeding it back in.
That's why the Iranians said, get the hell out of here.
You've got nothing here to do.
God's work in terms of furthering the Non-Proliferation Act.
You were here to trigger a conflict.
Your boss was working hand in glove with the Israelis.
Hand in glove.
And the intelligence you collected was fed to Israel by your boss.
For the express purpose of facilitating this very attack.
Judge, you remember when Grossi, who's the Director General, ran to Russia after the Ukrainians attacked the Zaporizhia nuclear power plant and immediately went to the Security Council and briefed them how dangerous it was to have these drones impacting the Zaporizhia plant and how the world must talk about an international force to secure this reactor or else we could be looking at a new Chernobyl.
Where is he now when Israel has attacked multiple Nuclear facilities inside Iran, some of which have resulted in radioactive leaks.
Where is he?
He's silent because he was part of the system that led to this attack.
It just shows the utter hypocrisy of the entire international community when it comes to Israel, because Israel can apparently get away with literal murder.
They can get away with threatening the world with radioactive contamination.
And where's the Security Council?
Where's the United States?
Silent or participating in the attack?
I'm ashamed to be an American today.
Not because I don't love my country.
I do.
I'm ashamed to be an American because the government that we have elected to represent us is behaving in such a grossly reprehensible manner.
It doesn't stand for anything that we claim to stand for as a people.
Mavericks upset, too.
Just a couple of comments.
The G7 meeting in Canada voted to ask for a de-escalation between the Israelis and the Iranians.
President Trump, of course, refused to go along with that.
All the other members did.
There are now 25,500 people watching us, Scott.
And I would encourage viewers to share the stream and repost it so more people can hear the brilliance, the intelligence, the personal courage of Scott Ritter.
Here's the, just to give your voice a little bit of a break, here's the Iranian foreign minister.
We have extensive evidence of how American forces assisted the Zionist regime.
But beyond our evidence, what is even more telling are the statements of the U.S. President himself in his tweets yesterday, and in his interviews, where he openly expressed support.
He clearly stated that such an operation would not have been possible without American equipment.
And he openly said that further steps are to come.
Therefore, from our perspective, the United States is a partner in these attacks and must take responsibility.
The United States is a partner in these attacks and must take responsibility.
Our friend and colleague Ray McGovern is worried about a false flag.
The Israelis attacking American troops in the region and claiming it was done by the Iranians.
I'm not worried about that because there's such a gross level of complicity.
A false flag is what you do when America is hesitating.
If this president was saying, I don't know, man, I don't know if I want to get involved.
This president's jumping in with both feet.
You don't need a false flag.
president's doing the job.
I mean, it's...
I'm worried about this president violating his duty and responsibility to the American people.
People need to understand that if we actually cross the red line and get involved in direct targeting of Iran, A, we're not going to change the outcome.
I mean, the Israelis are already putting every modern American-made aircraft there is into this conflict.
Do you really think?
When they have 300 flying, that suddenly a new carrier battle group with 75 aircraft is going to change anything?
It's the same airplanes, same bombs.
It's not going to have any impact.
They're not going to radically get the Iranians, who have been preparing for this very scenario now for over 20 years.
I mean, the Iranians are ready not just for what Israel is bringing to bear, but what the United States can bring to bear.
But what will happen is that the Iranians, and I just again want to remind people that up until today, I believe, the only missiles that have been fired at Israel have been done by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Command.
That the Iranian military has not played a role because they've been held in reserve.
Now they might start to get involved as they seek to bring the coup de grace to Israel and destroy everything.
But these missiles that have been held in reserve are missiles that could very well be used to target American bases.
And if Trump crosses the line of departure, our bases will be destroyed, and any American military personnel there will be subject to possible death, injury, etc.
This is on the president.
This is a man who promised he wasn't going to do that.
But the Iranians have the capacity to strike American military facilities in the region, and they have the capacity to strike American shipping.
The range of the Iranian missiles exceeds the range of the aircraft that would be called upon to strike Iran.
This president is setting us up for failure.
Can Israel defend itself effectively and thoroughly on its own?
No, it's over.
Israel's done.
Finished.
They can't even defend themselves effectively and thoroughly with all the assistance the United States is providing.
And there's nothing more we can provide on the ground.
The Iranians have broken the code.
You simply saturate this air defense system, cause it to open itself up, then you hit the various nodes, command and control nodes, the missile nodes, and you exhaust the interceptor missiles.
Right now, there's a reason why Iranian missiles are striking the ground in Israel.
It's because Israel can't defend itself.
And remember, this isn't Israel by itself.
This is Israel with the full capacity of the United States military and its allies, NATO allies, brought to bear on this.
There isn't anything more we can do to defend Israel.
There isn't anything more we can do to defend Israel.
We're doing the maximum we can, and it's not working.
And it's not just Israel running out of missiles.
We're running out of missiles.
Are American B-2 bombers and is an American aircraft carrier on their way there?
Well, the B-2 bombers have been deployed to Diego Garcia, so they're within striking distance.
They're just two aerial refueling.
Sessions away from being able to attack targets in Iran.
And they will probably be able to successfully attack these targets.
You know, there's everybody saying that if they use the 30,000-pound great bunker-busting bomb, that this will solve the problem of Firdos.
Well, that bunker-busting bomb, best case, penetrates 50, 60 meters underground.
The Firdos bunker is at least 80, 90 meters underground.
So we're not even going to put a dent in it.
Plus, I just want to remind people that we have used this huge, massive bunker-busting bomb against underground targets in Yemen.
We used that twice last year.
B-2 bombers dropping these bombs on targets.
Didn't work.
Didn't penetrate.
Didn't do anything.
So this will just bounce off.
So we're not going to accomplish the mission, but what we are going to do is get ourselves committed to resolving a problem that we now no longer have a conventional solution to.
And therefore, what's next?
And what's next is a B-61-12 nuclear bunker-busting bomb that, you know, will end up having to drop.
And now we have broken that nuclear taboo.
And that will just unleash hell on the rest of the world.
This president needs to stand down.
He really needs the Pentagon to tell him exactly what the truth is.
But instead, we have a Secretary of Defense, Hegseth, who allowed, you know, The U.S. military to be humiliated on the parade ground in Washington, D.C. He should have stopped that, but he didn't.
Instead, we just embarrassed ourselves around the world.
And now he's getting us set up for disaster in the Middle East.
Hegseth needs to be honest to the president.
We can't do this, Mr. President.
We don't have the capacity to do this.
If you want us to engage in this, it's going to result in using nuclear weapons that isn't going to solve anything.
It's just going to make the matter.
Worse, globally.
Please, Mr. President, stand down.
Tell your Secretary of State slash National Security Advisor to stop shilling for Israel and start representing the best interests of the United States of America.
Egg Seth could do this.
Tulsi Gabbard could do this.
She should be briefing him, Mr. President.
There is no threat there worthy of the use of nuclear weapons, Mr. President.
If this continues, Israel is going to be strategically defeated, and we will be defeated along with them.
Mr. President, we need to end this war now, and the way we do it is recognize that Iran has earned the right to make certain demands.
Not to have a nuclear weapon, no, but to make demands about Israel, to make demands that Israel should never again be allowed to.
You know, cavort with the International Atomic Energy Agency, until which time they have become signatories to nuclear land preparation treaty, put their nuclear weapons program on the table.
This is the direction we need to be going.
This gets solved when Israel stops committing genocide in Gaza.
I mean, the bottom line is, by compelling Iran to enter into this conflict decisive, Iran does get to dictate certain things getting out of this conflict.
Scott, we have 33,000 people watching us right now.
Of course, that grows astronomically once this is posted.
But this is the largest segment, the largest live audience that Judging Freedom has ever had in its three and a half years of existence.
Before we go, tell us about your program to bring about a normalization of relations between Russian people and American people in Kingston, New York, on Wednesday.
Was something the government wasn't able to deliver on.
In fact, when I tried to do it, I just want to remind people I was supposed to go to Russia in the summer of 2024 to have this very sort of summit to create opportunities in 16 different Russian cities to bring a Russian audience and an American audience together.
We had it all planned out, and then the U.S. government pulled my passport, and then they sent the FBI on me, accusing me of being a Russian agent by trying to promote this kind of dialogue for peace.
It's gone nowhere.
They seized my computers.
I have new computers.
They haven't given my passport back, but I can work here in the United So here we are on Wednesday.
We're going to have the, And that's our goal and objective.
I'm not worried, but I'm here to say that when the U.S. government now has stopped engaging in this dialogue, that means that what we're doing is no longer seen as operating in a supporting role of a larger, broader diplomatic initiative.
We are now the only game in town.
What we're doing on Wednesday is the only dialogue that's taking place between Americans and Russians.
Trump administration just shut down their official channels.
I don't know what this is going to mean in terms of how the U.S. government views this.
Am I going to be visited by 40 more FBI agents?
I don't know.
I do know that YouTube has taken exception to this.
I made a video, put it out on a new YouTube channel, and they pulled it, saying that apparently advocating for dialogue, normalcy, peace with the United States and Russia is a violation of their terms of service.
This is the direction.
We don't live in a nation governed by free speech, and we don't live in a nation where peace and the pursuit of peace is the norm.
It's now become the exception.
We're going to go forward and we're going to basically put forward a template on how to do this.
Maybe we're going to have to retrain the Trump administration into understanding how you go about doing meaningful dialogue.
But the purpose now is to actually condition the American people to be receptive of this kind of action.
So we're doing it on Wednesday.
It'll stream live, hopefully.
Hopefully it'll happen.
Maybe we'll have 40 additional guests who wear camouflage uniforms and carry guns and hold badges and say FBI and they'll try and shut it down.
I don't know.
But we're going to do it anyways because this is what has to be done if we're going to live in a nation that decides peace is better than war.
And, you know, the American people need to commit to this.
They need to commit to the fact that we have to have this kind of constructive dialogue.
And then we set an example.
We live by example.
We show the government what needs to be done.
And remember, the government works for us.
We, the people of the United States of America, the government works for us.
And so let's show the government what needs to be done.
And I'm going to do that on Wednesday.
God bless you, Scott.
Thank you for your time today.
Coming up after you is a person you know and admire, Professor Saeed Mohammed Morandi from Tehran.
I don't know what things are like where he is, but we'll find out in about 20 minutes.
Thank you very much for your time and for your passion, my dear friend.
Godspeed on Wednesday, and we'll talk to you again soon.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
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