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June 17, 2025 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
33:53
Max Blumenthal : Who is to Blame: Trump or Netanyahu?
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Hi, everyone.
Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
Today is Wednesday, June 18th, 2025.
Max Blumenthal will be here with us in just a moment on who's to blame for the attacks on Iran.
Is it Bibi Netanyahu or is it Donald Trump?
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Max Blumenthal, welcome here, my dear friend.
Isn't the tactic and the argument that Iran's nukes are just around the corner one that Netanyahu's been making for 30 years?
Netanyahu's been making that argument and if you read Netanyahu's books, he was making the same exact argument about Saddam Hussein's WMD, which he advanced in, I believe, 2002, testifying before the Senate as he was moving the U.S. to invade Iraq.
Netanyahu has been pushing this argument with great success using stenographers like Jeffrey Goldberg at The Atlantic, people on the right, and now he has found a vehicle with Donald Trump who denounced his own director of intelligence.
Or insulted her, declaring, I don't care what Tulsi thinks, referring to Tulsi Gabbard, because a reporter cited Tulsi Gabbard's national intelligence assessment that Iran was not producing a nuclear weapon.
And I saw on CNN one of these hack anchors say, well, that's because Tulsi Gabbard's a non-interventionist.
Well, every director of national intelligence has made that same assessment.
For the past decade, going back to the time when Chas Freeman was prevented from becoming Director of National Intelligence by the Netanyahu and Israeli proxy, Senator Joseph Lieberman, because he was going to assess that Iran was not producing a nuclear weapon that has no nuclear weapons program.
I can also tell you, just from my own experience and my own sources in Iran, In the Iranian political establishment, in talking to them about the nuclear program, that they have, some of them have sought with great interest in the holy city of Qom,
where the Iranian revolution began, speaking to scholars whether the fatwa issued by Ayatollah Khomeini can be lifted under any circumstances, the fatwa against producing a nuclear weapon.
And what they were told by scholars there is simply no.
So there's great resistance even in the Iranian establishment at its spiritual core to possessing a nuclear weapon.
Here is a...
And it shows about five or six lies, some of them under oath, by Netanyahu going back 30 years, making the same argument, in some cases saying this is weeks and even days away.
We will follow it.
Chris, let's follow it with Air Force One.
I know we said we're going to follow it with the other.
Let's follow it with Air Force One.
Interspersed in the Air Force One clip, Chris has put Tulsi Gabbard's testimony.
This is an earful, but you're familiar with all of this.
The deadline for attaining this goal is getting extremely close.
Iran, by the way, is also outpacing Iraq in the development of ballistic missile systems that they hope will reach the eastern seaboard of the United States within 15 years.
By next spring, at most, by next summer, at current enrichment rates, they will have finished the medium enrichment and move on to the final stage.
From there, it's only a few months, possibly a few weeks.
Before they get enough enriched uranium for the first bomb.
The foremost sponsor of global terrorism could be weeks away from having enough enriched uranium for an entire arsenal of nuclear weapons that would place a militant Islamic terror regime weeks away from having the fissile material for an entire arsenal of nuclear bombs.
If not stopped.
Iran could produce a nuclear weapon in a very short time.
It could be a year.
It could be within a few months.
You've 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 at 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.
Let's start at the end and then you can analyze Netanyahu as only you can do.
I don't care what she said.
She is his principal and, under the law, sole communicator on national intelligence.
Theoretically, she briefs him every day and now he says he doesn't care what she says.
She should probably resign.
Well, this is disgusting.
Because she has displayed so much loyalty to Trump and come over from the other party.
And this is how he treats her and Tucker Carlson, who is one of the intellectual architects of America First.
Trump referred to him as a kook and just dismissed him and said he should just go get his own network as Tucker Carlson is trying to bring Trump back to some semblance of reality.
And this is, of course, the Trump we know.
He'll step over anybody to get to his objective, but he's lost now.
He doesn't know where he's going, and his only guide is a foreign leader.
And everyone in MAGA sees it.
Everyone in America First sees it, that Trump is being led around blindly, buffoonishly, by a foreign leader, and is an ogre-like vehicle for his apocalyptic objective to incite a regional war.
We're referring to Benjamin Netanyahu, who has always sought to guide the American president into this kind of disaster and has failed up until this point.
He thought he had Trump by the short and curlies after he, through Mike Pompeo, got Trump to assassinate Qasem Soleimani.
But Trump pulled back after seeing the attack on the al-Assad base.
But now something else is happening.
Trump was relying heavily on Miriam Adelson's millions.
He said that Sheldon and Miriam Adelson have visited him more than any other people in the White House.
We're talking about over $600 million going into fueling Trump's career.
Miriam Adelson has a vast network of spooks, goons, manipulators, and literal hitmen at her disposal.
And Trump is not only bought and bossed, he's frightened.
I believe he's frightened.
I believe he's frightened that if he doesn't give in to Netanyahu at this moment, after two assassination attempts, that he himself could be at risk.
Something odd is going on here.
Trump previously mocked Barack Obama and mocked Marco Rubio for being under the influence and possibly going to – Now Trump is doing exactly that.
And he's throwing all the people who brought him to power under the bus publicly, humiliating them on behalf of a foreign leader.
And if you just look at the America First influencers on social media, none of them, none of them are in favor of this.
I went to the military parade, which was sort of a Trumpist.
Political spectacle blended with the Army's 250th birthday.
And I spoke to every person that I saw there with an America First hat on, with a red MAGA hat on, and I asked them, do you support the United States going to war for Israel?
And none of them were enthusiastic, and many of them were disgusted with the idea.
the veterans I spoke to were even more disgusted.
And you can see even what's happening at the So Trump is basically imposing this war in an almost totalitarian fashion against his own base, and he's made no attempt to explain it to the American public whatsoever.
The period after 9-11 and in the run-up to the Iraq War, the Bush communications team was acting in overdrive.
They were doing everything they could to propagandize the American public.
This was the centerpiece of Bush's campaign for re-election.
It's all we heard about was Saddam's WMD.
Nothing like that is taking place.
Trump just said, I don't even know what I will do.
He's sort of an imperious figure hiding from the public right now.
And no one even knows what's going to happen next.
It's all up to Israel.
The mask is off.
Israel is leading the U.S. I had to get that in there.
That's producer Chris, for those of you not familiar with Chris's last name, has been posting against the war.
And this just in from Jeff Sachs.
The IAEA chief, a two-bit political hack, if ever there was one, on the payroll of Mossad, admits this morning, just 15 minutes ago, that...
Who in the world would believe Trump and Netanyahu in light of this?
Well, and one of the talking points that's been going out from Trump to his coterie of right-wing influencers that we've seen repeated by the more pliable, avaricious ones who are dependent on Trump for their fame and fortune, like Charlie Kirk, whose entire career was fueled by pro
And that's Netanyahu's ruse for Trump, is to get the U.S. involved.
To then trigger Iranian attacks on U.S. bases, which will bring the U.S. up the escalation ladder, could lead to U.S. casualties, calls for revenge from fanatical Israel firsters in Trump's camp like Mark Levin, and put Trump in a corner where he can't get out of this war.
That's the point.
My point is, this is not about the nuclear issue.
It's not about nuclear weapons.
Nuclear weapons is just the trigger point as Iraqi WMD was.
We saw that on day one with Israel's unprovoked surprise attack, which was a decapitation strike aimed at the leadership of the IRGC and nuclear scientists, and Israel has been pushing Trump to assassinate the leader of Iran, Ayatollah Khamenei, which would be just received as a massive insult by millions and millions of Iranians.
This is about regime change.
What Netanyahu wants is regime change.
He wants to remove the last powerful country in the region that is willing to stand up with dignity against his occupation, apartheid regime, what he's doing to the Palestinians and refuses to accept the protection racket of the United States military which puts bases in their country and protects their oil fields.
Won't go along with it.
So it's about destroying the entire political system of Iran, and then it's about looting the state of Iran, as Saddam Hussein sought to do when he launched his war on Iran and occupied the province of Khuzestan, the most oil-rich province of Iran, in 1980.
That's why the Shah, the Shah's failed son, is being put up as the next leader of Iran by Israel, by the U.S. It's because he will sell off the country's resources and we can see what's happening in Syria.
So let's not be confused about nuclear weapons.
Nuclear weapons is just a trick being deployed by Netanyahu to get the U.S. involved in a much wider project that will lead to the dissolution of any order in that region and a migration crisis in Europe like we've never seen before.
Is there any question in your mind but that Trump and Netanyahu connived with his speech, Trump's speech in Saudi Arabia, to create in the international community the false impression that the negotiations were serious and at the same time the Israelis were planning to and did, of course, succeed in assassinating the Iranian negotiators?
Yeah, Israel assassinated Ali Shamhani, who was the lead negotiator for the leader of Iran, who was pledging to make serious compromises for a deal, just as they assassinated every negotiator for Hamas, every single one.
This is what Israel has done all the way back to the 70s with the PLO.
We've done an analysis of Trump and his brain at the gray zone with our investigative technology and found that Trump doesn't have the capacity to connive with a figure like Netanyahu.
He's mentally very lazy.
And what took place was Trump was manipulated and possibly intimidated into getting to where he is right now.
But the reason that we're talking about this crisis.
How did that story get out into the public?
It came through Netanyahu's top mouthpiece at Israel's main media channel, Channel 12, Amit Segal, who began citing an Israeli source.
Which obviously was Netanyahu.
That Donald Trump was using negotiations as cover for this attack in order to lull the Iranians into a false sense of security.
And while it's true that the Iranians were lulled, then that was a major mistake on their part.
Very foolish.
Netanyahu was leaking that story or floating that story out there through his Main guy in the Israeli media in order to create the sense inside Iran that the US was directly engaged in the decapitation assault on day one so that Iran would begin attacking US bases and it would draw the US in.
Now, Donald Trump has been convinced since that attack, which was a very devastating attack, that Israel is winning.
And now Trump wants to claim some It's a modicum of credit for it.
And he has referred to Israel as we, I think, in a true social statement.
It wasn't even in an interview.
We also saw Ted Cruz, Tel Aviv Ted, one of the top recipients of APAC money in the Senate, in an interview in which he was being humiliated by Tucker Carlson, also referred to Israel as we.
And they're both kind of giving away the game that the U.S. is involved militarily.
But not at the level that Israel currently wants or needs.
Israel needs the U.S. This is an important point.
Israel needs the U.S. to be more involved because Israel can't finish the war it started.
Israel's attack may have succeeded initially.
But at this point, and if you pay close attention even to the footage of Iranian missile strikes, retaliatory strikes on Israeli cities, You'll see that Israel's air defense systems are becoming exhausted.
These are very expensive.
They cost $285 million a night to operate, and we're paying for it.
and Iran is getting through it with very increasingly small salvos of missiles doing damage and is able to target intelligence and military targets.
The Washington Post, citing Israeli and U.S. officials, just reported that Israel will be exhausted and have to ration its air defenses in 10 to 12 days, which is something I've also been hearing.
So Israel's actually failing, and the only question is how many more ballistic missiles And there is not the same rally around the flag effect that we're seeing in Iran.
What deep grievances with the government are actually now demanding that Iran retaliate hard.
I'm going to ask you in a minute or so how badly Israeli infrastructure has been damaged by the Iranian retaliation.
But beforehand, this is priceless.
Tucker Carlson sent us a small clip.
You may have seen it already, sent it to a number of his friends of the interview with Ted Cruz.
Bear in mind, The Ted Cruz is right up there with Senators Lindsey Graham and Richard Blumenthal and Tom Cotton being among the most radically pro-war members of the United States Congress.
But watch this.
How many people living around, by the way?
I don't know the population.
At all?
No, I don't know the population.
You don't know the population of the country you seek to topple?
How many people living around?
92 million.
Okay.
How could you not know that?
I don't sit around memorizing population tables.
Well, it's kind of relevant because you're calling for the overthrow of the government.
Why is it relevant whether it's 90 million or 80 million or 100 million?
Why is that relevant?
Because if you don't know anything about the country...
Okay, what's the ethnic mix of Iran?
They are Persians and predominantly Shia.
Okay, this is cute.
You don't know anything about Iran.
Okay, I am not the Tucker Carlson expert on Iran.
You're a senator who's calling for the overthrow of the government.
You don't know anything about the country.
No, you don't know anything about the country.
You're the one who claims they're not trying to murder Donald Trump.
No, I'm not saying that.
You're the one who can't figure out if it was a good idea to kill General Soleimani and you said it was bad.
You don't believe they're trying to murder Trump.
Yes, I do.
Because you're not calling for military strikes against them in retaliation.
If he really believes that.
Carrying out military.
Thank you.
I said we.
Israel is leading them, but we're supporting them.
Well, you're breaking news here because the U.S. government last night denied, the National Security Council spokesman Alex Pfeiffer denied on behalf of Trump that we were acting on Israel's behalf in any offensive capacity at all.
No, we're not bombing them.
Israel's bombing them.
You just said we were.
We are supporting Israel.
This is high stakes.
You're a senator.
If you're saying the United States government is at war with Iran right now, people are listening.
Absolutely dynamite decimation.
Of Ted Cruz.
And this shows you what Ted Cruz really is.
It's just a hollow shell for AIPAC.
His top advisor on this issue, I'm not sure if he's still in his office, but for years and years, I think he still is, is named Omri Seren.
And this just came to me.
And he's an Israeli.
He is an Israeli who is in the United States to burrow within the national security architecture and lead figures like Ted Cruz to use the U.S. military, its assets, and our blood and treasure as Americans on behalf of this tiny little foreign apartheid state.
And Omri Seren's wife, Merav, was actually inserted into the Trump administration without anyone knowing by Mike Waltz.
And she was finally drummed out.
About three weeks ago.
So that's who Ted Cruz is really answering to.
It's why we call him Tel Aviv Ted.
And Tucker exposed him because he doesn't understand anything about Iranian society or that it's not going to be a cakewalk, as we were told in advance of the Iraq War, to enact regime change in Iran.
Iran does have a clerical leadership, but Ayatollah Khamenei is very, very popular, including with people with grievances with the government.
And below him are institutions that people actually believe in, that are functioning, which people will defend.
As we saw when Israel launched a terrorist airstrike on IRIB, which is Iran's version of VOA or PBS or NPR, it's its nationality.
I actually participated.
In a public conference in that building, in that very complex, just a few weeks ago.
And the building was bombed.
The media broadcasters knew it was going to be bombed.
They stayed on air.
And during the bombing, they stayed in the building while it was burning, and they continued to stay on air to demonstrate.
Their belief, their support for just the Islamic Republic generally as an independent country.
And so that's going to be a huge problem.
Ted Cruz doesn't understand that, but he doesn't even know the population.
The population of Tehran itself is significantly larger than Israel's.
This is a regional powerhouse, and Ted Cruz thinks it's just another tinpot dictatorship or that when the dictator leaves, as in Syria, that the whole thing's going to collapse.
So that's why that's significant.
Watch this female reporter on air.
There's a translation.
When the bombs hit.
And then, I'm sure you know this, she was back on air about an hour later on the other side of the building.
And also an hour later, we interviewed Professor Mirandi from the basement of the building.
But here's the actual explosion as captured.
If you hear the voice of an invader on the homeland, it is the voice of an aggressor against truth and justice.
What you observed, the sound you heard, is the murky, dust-laden voice of the studio.
*gunshot*
But this is not a military target.
I thought they were targeting military sites.
No, and this is classic Israeli behavior.
This is a country that has deliberately murdered scores and scores, as many as 200 journalists in the Gaza Strip.
Hossam Shabbat, for example, of Al Jazeera.
Ismail Al Ghul was decapitated by an Israeli drone in his car, and now they're targeting this massive That building was built in 1940.
It's a vast, very elegant building in which public conferences are held, and they broadcast, and millions and millions of Iranians watch that network every day, or the various networks.
There are also other programs, including children's programs, that are broadcast from there.
So this is reminiscent of the US military's attack.
On a Serbian TV station during its destruction of Yugoslavia.
And it is a terrorist act.
It is classic state terror.
And what we saw there was resistance in action.
The resistance of Iranian media professionals who want to keep broadcasting because they believe that they are telling the truth.
That Western corporate media refuses to tell.
And in Iran, something I experienced visiting people in their private homes, especially middle-class people, is that they have satellite TV.
And satellite TV there is dominated by BBC Persia, which is a very sophisticated regime change vehicle run with support of the British Foreign Office and British intelligence.
and Iran International, which is now almost officially aligned with Israel and Saudi Arabia, and just hosted Benjamin Netanyahu for an exclusive interview.
What's taking place in Iran is civilians are being slaughtered.
People are being given 3A.
And when they see someone like the Shah's son.
The son of Reza Pahlavi, support these terrorist attacks.
Or they see Netanyahu be hosted by Iran International.
It discredits those regime change vehicles.
And when they see this resistance, that woman has become a symbol across the region.
And it defeats the entire calculus of regime change.
Israel has miscalculated here if it thinks it's going to achieve regime change in the coming days.
Before we go, are the Israelis hiding the true nature and extent of the destruction caused by Iranian missiles to their infrastructure and other buildings?
Iran has hit the Nevatim Air Base again, which is the central node of the genocide in Gaza.
It's also where Israel receives its weapons and munitions from the United States.
Iran has hit the Maor Base, which contains THAAD missiles provided by the U.S. Iran may have hit the Mossad headquarters again.
Iran has hit a sensitive site in Herzliya contained in a bus yard, which is now under censorship.
Iran has hit, uh, And what I've been told by Israelis I know is that it's impossible to order food after 6 p.m.
There's an atmosphere of every man for himself.
People are spending more and more time in...
And this humiliation is now under official cover-up to the point where the security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, has called for the arrest and prosecution of anyone filming Iranian missile strikes.
That's why we're seeing so much less footage.
Israel's begun arresting foreign journalists who have been filming from rooftops, and they're introducing...
So we're seeing a military powerhouse, a Goliath that has never experienced a rock delivered from a slingshot straight to its head, let alone a Fatah tube hypersonic missile at the core of its military.
I should also mention the Hakiriya, the defense ministry, was hit by an Iranian ballistic missile on the first night of Iran's retaliation attacks.
And Trey Yinks, the Fox News reporter, was quickly moved away by Israeli soldiers who didn't want him to film it.
They're being humiliated at night and in broad daylight we can see the destruction.
And Netanyahu is hiding in a luxury bunker.
Keeping his population above ground as the fodder of Zion, hoping that more and more of them in their suffering will compel the U.S. to intervene.
And that is the point of Netanyahu.
Has Ben-Gurion Airport been hit?
Ben-Gurion Airport is completely closed and Israelis are You can see boat traffic in the Mediterranean is increasing massively.
These are wealthy Israelis who are able to gain access to private yachts and other boats to go to Cyprus.
This has not been seen before in Israel since 1973.
And even then, the level of trauma and shock was not the same.
No one who's been paying attention to the Holocaust that Israel's carrying out in Gaza, where just yesterday Israel slaughtered 56 people seeking a bag of flour, starved war refugees.
No one who's been paying attention to that has an ounce of sympathy for any of these Israelis who've been celebrating that slaughter and participating in it.
And that's another problem that Israel faces is international sympathy is gone, except at the most elite levels where leaders like Frederick Mertz in Germany or Donald Trump are bought Boston intimidated.
Thank you.
Max Blumenthal, thank you very much.
What an extraordinary description of what's happening there that we, as bright and gifted and well-connected as our colleagues on here are, nobody brings us this stuff as lies.
Like and vividly as you do.
Thank you, my dear friend.
Thanks for everything.
Thanks for accommodating my schedule.
Be safe and we'll see you soon.
Thanks.
Just doing my part.
Thanks for having me.
Okay.
More than his part, he's really an extraordinary font.
Of information which the mainstream media doesn't want you to see.
Coming up later today on all of this at 3 o 'clock this afternoon, Phil Giraldi at 4 o 'clock.
I still don't know where he is.
Maybe in Russia.
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