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June 16, 2025 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
22:57
LtCOL. Karen Kwiatkowski : Can the US be Trusted?
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Hi, everyone.
Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
Today is Tuesday, June 17, 2025.
Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski will be here with us in a minute on Can the United States Be Trusted?
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Colonel Kwiatkowski, always a pleasure, my dear friend.
Thank you very much for joining us and accommodating my schedule.
Last month in Saudi Arabia, the president gave a talk in which he condemned neocons and their attitude.
He denounced the United States military adventurism in the Middle East.
He proclaimed himself a president of peace.
I guess he was having a moment because none of that is meaningful to him.
You know, the neocons, I mean, they are applauding him.
And he is actually out neoconing the neocons right now.
I guess whatever he says is ephemeral.
And again, which is why I don't think any other country around the planet is going to trust him in terms of negotiations or anything else.
I mean, you know, security alliances, promises that he may make, things that he says he's going to do, they're not going to believe him until he does it.
And of course, any agreements, peace agreements, it would be ludicrous to deal with President Trump.
So the negotiators, the very human beings that were across the table from Steve Witkoff, were murdered by the Israelis in the first strike.
Trump boasted about it in a posting.
He posted about 6.30 in the morning on Friday morning.
We were on air when the post first became available.
And the language in there is basically, you want to negotiate with us, you better agree with us, or we'll kill you.
Now, who would want to negotiate with the United States, and who would trust anything that negotiators said?
If Witkoff knew that Trump's statements were deceptive, then Witkoff is not a serious negotiator whose words can't be believed.
If Witkoff didn't know it, then he's just a stooge and a puppet.
Duped by Trump, as apparently Marco Rubio was when he said before Trump's full screen, we had nothing to do with this and knew nothing about it.
Well, you may have known nothing about it, but the CIA, which supposedly works for you and for the president, obviously did.
Yeah.
Yeah, really, you can't trust any of the people around him just because of that reason.
Either they are part of his charade that he constantly plays and is blustered, or they aren't informed.
So either way, you can't deal not just with Trump, but you can't deal with his administration.
And you know, there's really no trusted, independent.
And that executive branch is wildly dysfunctional, as you can see, and really from the head, from the head.
So, you know, Trump, what got me is, you know, he goes, oh, I invented...
Are you freaking kidding me?
You know, he boasts about these votes that he supposedly got.
Well, that'll never happen.
Not that he's not running, but I mean, he has destroyed credibility for all politicians.
I mean, he's actually outdone them.
Maybe that's what he's trying to do, because he likes to be number one.
You know, he's number one in destroying credibility of an elected politician.
So, Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, famously testified in March before one of the congressional committees, I don't know if it was Senator House or the House under oath, that the IC, the intelligence community, was unanimous and steadfast in its view.
That the Iranians do not have and were not developing a nuclear weapon.
And she didn't say this, but she intimated that MI6 and Mossad agreed.
Watch what the president said when he was asked about this Sunday night on Air Force One.
Chris, cut number 14. People always said that you don't believe Iran should be able to have a nuclear weapon.
But how close do you personally think that they were to getting one?
Because Tulsi Gabbard testified in March that the intelligence community said Iran wasn't building a nuclear weapon.
The IC continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon.
I don't care what she said.
I think they were very close to having it.
I don't care what she said.
Shouldn't she resign?
From her job.
She's the one that gives the president every morning an intelligence briefing.
And he says on national television, I don't care what she said.
She's the one that has access to the raw data.
He doesn't.
And he says, I don't care what she said.
Yeah.
Yeah, she should resign.
And a few others that are opposed to what is going on here should stand up and resign.
But I don't expect that they will.
But, you know, I think H.L. Mencken had a quote.
That at some point in democracies, we would actually, you know, the idiots would vote and we would actually be governed by an idiot.
And I think, unfortunately, we probably reached that.
I thought maybe we had reached it with Biden because of his mental handicaps, you know, his age-related whatever it was.
But no, I think I think we've got an active, completely functional idiot in charge.
And if you if you ever had any doubt about that.
We're going to post three full screens of postings that he posted today.
One at 11.55 in the morning, one at 12.19, one at 12.22.
One wonders what the man does.
This is 11.55 this morning.
We now have complete and total control of the skies over Iran.
Just as an aside, Ritter says that is absolutely positively untrue.
But that's what he says.
Had good sky trackers and other defensive equipment and plenty of it, but it doesn't compare to American-made, conceived, and manufactured stuff.
Nobody does it better than the good old USA, President of the United States.
20 minutes later, we know exactly where the so-called supreme leader is hiding.
He's an easy target, but is safe there.
We are not going to take him out, kill, at least not for now.
But we don't want missiles shot at civilians or American soldiers.
Our patience is wearing thin.
Thank you for your attention to this matter.
And then three minutes later, as if that wasn't enough, in all caps, unconditional surrender.
Is he running this war or is Netanyahu?
I mean, obviously, Trump feels very invested in this unwarranted and unprovoked attack by Israel.
Even though they screwed up his peace talks, you know, maybe he really did think that he was going to have a meeting on Sunday.
Or maybe he didn't.
Maybe he thought he knew this was happening, but he seems Trump himself, It seems like only Trump wants to join the war, so maybe we have to apply the Lindsey Graham rule and just say, look, if you want to fight this war, please, please, put on a uniform, run over there as fast as you can, and fight it.
That maybe is what he wants to do.
I don't know, his enthusiasm and his insanity I'm really speechless.
How do you think foreign leaders of major countries like, say, China, Russia, India, Brazil, react when they see this?
How will their diplomats react when they deal with the de facto Secretary of State Steve Witkoff or the de jure Secretary of State Marco Rubio?
I'm not saying this to ridicule Rubio, but it's just the way Trump has chosen to set up the government.
One cuts ribbons and hires and fires and gives speeches.
The other flies around the world and negotiates with foreign diplomats.
Well, I mean, you know, for reaction, there's a And I think what the world leaders see and what they are concluding is that it's almost like you see something kind of a bobbly head and you go, whoa, that's kind of crazy.
It's attracting my attention.
But then you realize, wait a minute, where's the steady hands?
Where are the serious minded leaders in the world?
Where are the people that say what they mean and mean what they say?
Continually on social media, you know, blurting out insane things like unconditional surrender.
That's absolutely insane.
Why would we demand that?
This is just insane.
So I think the other leaders of the world, and that's many, you know, hundreds of them are looking to where real leadership can be found.
And obviously I'm talking about leadership.
Because that's really the counterbalance to U.S. hegemony.
So if you look at the leaders of the BRICS countries, they know each other well, and I don't think any of them behave in this way.
They treat each other with respect.
I mean, for Trump to make a joke, almost a juvenile joke, and kind of chuckle that the people he was dealing with And he says, oh, well, they didn't die of COVID.
You know, they didn't die of the flu.
I mean, what an insane way of treating that.
Is that inhuman?
And really, he's proving to be.
So, yeah.
There's a turning away from the United States.
And it's already started long, long before this.
Our money is turning into crap.
Our debt is high.
We warmonger.
We lie.
And we've had really weak leaders for many, many, many years.
I guess our country is run by the deep state, whatever that is.
But the other countries, they're wary of that.
And they have been for a long time.
And so this just adds to that trend.
And what it brings to mind to me, Israel is claiming, or a lot of, I know Scott Ritter said this, I heard him say this early on, that this was a regime change operation.
Not really about the nukes, but a regime change thing.
But if you're going to do a regime change, of course, our track record, Israel's track record is terrible with this, but if you're going to do that, you need to make sure that your attack on the other country doesn't unify the population.
Because we know that when a country is attacked, their population may be Squabbling and quibbling with each other, but they unify.
Correct.
That's just normal.
Do these people in the Trump administration actually think that by going along with these attacks, funding them, since everything Netanyahu has came from us, that the...
Of course not.
They're going to rally around the government.
By the way, the government was just popularly elected.
The president is a moderate who would be only too happy to sit down with Steve Witkoff or Marco Rubio.
Two things I want to point out.
One is we're conducting a chat room poll.
So all the people that write in during this segment with you on Colonel Kwiatkowski.
And the question is, Yes, no, or undecided.
But I do want to play Dana Bash, the political commentator and anchor on CNN.
Apparently had a phone call with Trump over the weekend, and she wasn't allowed to tape it, but obviously she has a memory, and she made notes.
She called into her CNN colleagues right after she got off the phone with him, and here's what she said.
Cut number 12. And then he went on to say this.
Iran should have listened to me when I said, you know, I gave them, I don't know if you know this, but I gave them a 60-day warning, and today is day 61. And then he said they, meaning Iran, should now come to the table to make a deal before it's too late.
And then he said something really noteworthy.
He said, the people I was dealing with are dead, the hardliners, to which I just wanted to underscore.
So what you're saying is Israel has now killed the people who you were dealing with.
And he said very sarcastic.
I think that's what you may have been referring to earlier when you said flu or COVID.
When I played this clip for the great Alistair Crook and asked him how he would respond, He said, it's not worthy of a response.
It's really a sickening statement for a president of the United States to gloat that the human beings with whom the president's negotiators had been negotiating were murdered by the president's friends.
That's literally what happened here.
Yeah.
And he's acting like after the fact...
You know, the 61-day thing is kind of nutty.
Because if that was the case, don't you think it would have come up sooner?
You're like, hey, we're approaching the deadline.
I don't know if he's making stuff up to kind of validate his own position.
Because he may not be in as much control as he would like to be.
No American president really is in control of a lot of things.
You know, we've seen this repeatedly.
We're parts of the deep state, intelligence communities, other countries.
There's a lot of things that happen.
And the president wants to be seen as all-wise and all-knowing when in fact they're not.
So some of his bluster may be coming from that perspective.
So he goes back and says, well, 61 days.
Because that is ridiculous.
To say that after the fact means that I mean, if you thought this date was coming up, don't you think you would have rolled that into your negotiations?
This is a guy who said many times, including in his inaugural address, He is a president of peace.
He is against forever wars.
He is against using the military in the Middle East to change governments and change the way people live.
I guess he should have said, except when Bibi Netanyahu wants it.
Except when Bibi Netanyahu wants it.
Yeah.
You know, I thought earlier that Bibi politically is in a downward spiral.
I think he's highly vulnerable.
He has like a cat with nine lives politically.
But, you know, the man is old.
He's not well.
You know, it's unpopular for the most part with the Knesset and with the people.
And, of course, the whole world hates him.
So you have that.
But I thought maybe that Trump was going to create some space when it looked like for a moment he did create space between him and Netanyahu.
And I thought it was, I think I said this here.
He doesn't like to associate with losers.
But I have to rethink that because Trump is a loser.
So maybe he likes this.
Maybe he thinks this will be part of his legacy of some sort.
Well, it now appears as though the so-called snub of Netanyahu when Trump visited the Middle East and ostentatiously did not visit Israel was all a scam.
Yeah.
The leak from the White House that Trump is sick and tired of Netanyahu and feels he's being used or played by him was all a scam.
This was all intended to lull the Iranian leadership and the Iranian negotiators into a false sense of security, which is why I asked you at the outset and you've answered in great detail.
Can the U.S. be trusted?
And the answer is no.
Is this dangerous for American diplomats knowing that they can't even engage in diplomacy because no one will believe what they say?
Yeah.
I mean, he's single-handedly really destroyed the State Department's credibility and the Pentagon's credibility.
And he really should be careful about boasting about American military You know, we just, you know, we just pulled out of the Red Sea for a reason, okay?
And that wasn't because we beat the Hooties, okay?
So Trump is living in a fantasy world and he's also lying.
So these two things together really, you know, I mean, he was impeached twice for stupid, the most stupid reasons I can imagine.
I think it was very.
But what he's doing now rises to the level that the Congress should be concerned, and yet not a whisper, not a whisper of impeachment.
I guess that will change if the House goes to the Democrats.
Chris has a result on the poll, although people can still vote on it.
Simple question.
Should Tulsi Gabbard resign?
Yes, 73%.
No, 17%.
Undecided.
Who could be undecided?
Well, all right, there were undecideds at the time of the American Revolution.
Undecided 9%.
It's a terrible state of affairs, Karen.
Terrible state of affairs.
I think the polls are going to start to manifest a loss of faith and credibility in him, even though what he's been doing on...
This morning they arrested the controller of New York City because he was walking alongside a person that was supposed to be arrested.
As they left in a courtroom, they arrested this person with them, even though they don't have the authority to arrest Americans.
And they didn't have an arrest warrant for the alien.
And they, again, wear masks.
Why does the Department of Homeland Security police mask their faces?
Cops in America have never worn masks, not in the modern era.
Yeah, well, maybe the era that's coming, they will.
Yeah.
It's very dark.
It's very dark and very concerning.
And I think the best thing Americans can do right now is be extremely alert.
In every way, really.
Alert to political lies.
Alert to what's happening around.
If your gut is telling you, homeland security really shouldn't have masks when they do their business.
If your gut's telling you that, believe your gut.
This is our country.
They're not taking it away from us.
And Trump, even if he pulled a big trick on everybody, you know, America first, I care about the working class, the working people, you know, we've been lied to before.
We'll get over that pretty quickly.
We need to assert ourselves a little bit more aggressively.
Thank you, Karen Kwartkowski.
Much appreciated.
All the best.
We'll look forward to seeing you next week.
Absolutely.
Thanks, Judge.
Of course.
Coming up tomorrow, Wednesday at 8 in the morning, Professor Gilbert Doctorow at 11 in the morning.
We'll call and wake him up.
Max Blumenthal at 3 in the afternoon.
Phil Giraldi at 4 in the afternoon.
I don't know where on the planet he is, but he'll be here at 4 in the afternoon.
Pepe Escobar.
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