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June 25, 2025 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
32:41
Max Blumenthal : How Trump Was Manipulated.
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Hi, everyone.
Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
Today is Wednesday, June 25th, 2025.
Max Blumenthal will be with us here in just a moment on how was Trump manipulated.
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Max Blimethal, welcome here, my dear friend.
When Donald Trump ordered the bombing on Friday, on Saturday night and Sunday morning, depending upon which time zone you're in, over Iran, did he and Netanyahu know that Trump was bombing empty tunnels and that the nuclear centrifuges and enriched material had been removed?
Well, whether they did or not, Trump sought to convince Americans and his base that they were destroying Iran's nuclear program in a top gun style operation with the porn-themed name Midnight Hammer.
And it's turned out to be Operation Midnight Scammer, as what Iran even told us days before, which is that it had moved its enriched uranium stockpile out of Fordo, has turned out to be confirmed by a Defense Intelligence Agency assessment,
along with other intelligence officials who were blowing the whistle on this scam, as well as Israeli pundits speaking in broad daylight on Israeli networks, that this was just simply a symbolic strike by Trump, giving in to Israeli manipulation, which was designed to draw the U.S. into a much larger regime change theater.
And I heard that from a Trump official, an insider, who was familiar with a lot of these discussions on how Trump was manipulated almost exclusively through the Mossad and Israeli briefers pushing weapons of mass destruction deceptions that would be laughed at by the American public,
which were laughed at, which is why Donald Trump didn't even bother making the case to Americans, as George W. Bush did on Iraq, that the smoking gun could soon become a mushroom cloud.
And so now nobody believes him except for the biggest Trump cultists and even the intellectual architects of America First, like Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon, have accused Trump of betraying their principles and are portraying him as kind of Orange McCain.
Nice phrase, Orange McCain.
I keep thinking of that phrase from Tom Woods.
No matter who you vote for, you end up with John McCain.
You are quite right, Max.
There was no serious effort to persuade the American people because there was no evidentiary basis with which to make that case.
Today, in Brussels, he doubted, denied, and condemned the findings of his own defense intelligence agency.
You just alluded to that.
When he said, I don't care what Tulsi Gabbard thinks, he doubted, denied, and condemned the findings of his own domestic intelligence.
Well, not domestic, his own intelligence agencies, non-military.
Who does he talk to?
Is it Netanyahu himself, or are there actually Mossad briefers in the Oval Office?
There were actually Mossad briefers in the Oval Office, in the briefing room.
This is public.
It was well known, but not very, didn't receive enough focus, that Mossad Director David Barney and Ron Dermer, whose father was the mayor of Miami Beach and is basically an American Israel lobbyist who went to work for Netanyahu, had been quote unquote briefing the president and pushing him.
And they nearly pushed him to do some version of this strike back in April.
That's when Mike Waltz was fired for secretly coordinating with Netanyahu.
So this is well known.
But what I got from a Trump official was that they were telling Trump that Iran had not only had like a nuclear stockpile that could become a nuclear weapon in a matter of weeks, but that within one week, it would provide a nuclear warhead to the Yemeni Houthis, which is just absolutely laughable.
The Trump official described the briefers as completely tactless, hyper-aggressive, fear-mongering.
And the person that it worked on best was someone who is the Israel lobby, which is basically an arm of Israeli intelligence in the United States, AIPAC had cultivated since the beginning of his career.
In April at the Gray Zone, and I think we discussed this here, we produced or I produced exclusive audio from an off-the-record private APAC congressional briefing in which APAC's new CEO, Elliot Brandt, described how his organization had groomed John Ratcliffe since he was a congressman coming out of Dallas, the Dallas area.
Who is John Ratcliffe?
He has no background in intelligence, no background in the military, was a small town lawyer who became mayor of a town of 7,000 outside Dallas called Heath, then got elected to Congress, became funded by APAC with Israel lobby money, and then emerges as one of Donald Trump's most loyal defenders.
Donald Trump nominates him for director of national intelligence simply because he wants a loyalist there, doesn't care about his background or that he was just a backbench or nobody.
And John Ratcliffe's nomination initially fails because he lied about taking a lead role on one of the most politicized terrorism cases in American history against the Holy Land Foundation, a case which was managed by Israel's Mossad to the point where the Mossad actually sent one of its agents into the courtroom.
The courtroom had to be cleared, and these Palestinian-American defendants were subjected to dodgy dossiers claiming that they were at the nexus of a Hamas funding terrorist network, and they were all given life sentences.
Completely phony trial.
But Ratcliffe lied about being in that case.
He eventually made it to DNI a year later.
Then when Trump won again, he was appointed CIA director.
And John Ratcliffe has since become the key channel for Mossad director David Barney in delivering Donald Trump phony Israeli intelligence briefings, claiming that Iran's nuclear stockpile was going to turn into a weapon in a week, and that Trump could immediately eliminate it with this top gun style strike.
So John Ratcliffe was referred to me by this Trump official as Mossad's stenographer.
And now look at what Donald Trump is about to do.
Now that his whole case has collapsed about blowing up the Fordo, he is going to release more Israeli intelligence to counter his own U.S. intelligence officials in the Pentagon.
That's what Donald Trump is going to do to save his hide.
Wow.
I don't want to get too deep into the politics, but Congressman Ro Kahana, a progressive Democrat who's hooked up with Congressman Thomas Massey, a libertarian Republican, arguing that what Trump did was unconstitutional, did appear on air and ticked off mentioned.
I don't mean he aggravated.
He mentioned one by one the MAGA people that are staunchly opposed to what Trump did.
You mentioned a few of them earlier.
Chris, cut number six.
The tragedy in this country is that we keep entering these overseas wars.
We triumphantly declare the mission is accomplished the day after, and then we're left with Americans bearing the consequences for decades.
The headlines all across this country say the United States enters war with Iran.
He is actually representing a lot of the people in the MAGA base, people like Steve Bannon, Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Theo Vaughan, who has had them on, who's saying we don't want this war.
And I heard your interview with Secretary Rubio.
He's saying, well, we want a peace deal.
We want to make sure that Iran can enrich uranium through civil purposes.
Well, we had that.
We had that at the JCPOA, and there was not a single violation that the IEA found during that time.
So my question, I guess, is now you're going to force Iran to go covertly in developing this nuclear material.
Now you've put American troops at risk.
Now you're wasting billions of our dollars because we're sending more troops to the Middle East.
What did you accomplish and why are you oblivious to the American people who are sick of these wars?
There you go.
That's an excellent summary, I think, of where we stand now.
But for Trump to continue to repudiate his own intel in deference to the Mossad, is this all to please Miriam Adelson and her colleagues?
I think this is actually to please his own base, the Trump cult, which believes that he actually carried out this brilliant maneuver that destroyed Iran's nuclear stockpile and ended the problem.
And it's to get the Israelis off his back.
Because if Trump can convince the world that the nuclear issue is over, that it was solved with one bombing run, and then he engineered this brilliant ceasefire, a permanent ceasefire in which all sides got to claim victory.
And there was this choreographed exchange of symbolic strikes in which Iran got to save face by striking the Aludaid base.
Then Donald Trump's legacy is pure and he's on the path towards receiving the Nobel Prize for which he was nominated by Pakistan just 24 hours before his strike.
It all was perfectly choreographed, but it's not going to go the way Trump wants because it was all based on a lie because the Israelis are going to violate his ceasefire again and again.
As Trump complained in the Rose Garden, he said the Israelis were breaking the ceasefire and he was disgusted that they dumped munitions over Tehran in violation of the ceasefire and forced a 12-hour extension.
And he said they don't know what the F they're doing.
And he also has acknowledged that Israel was hit very hard by ballistic missiles.
So Trump is actually very unhappy with Israel.
He's afraid of what could come next.
And he sees his entire master plan potentially collapsing as the Israeli military chief of staff, Eyal Zamir, has said that the war is not over.
This was just a phase.
The Israelis will never honor a ceasefire.
They are in a race against time and their colonial psyche of existing in this kind of European reality where they never experience any damage while they're carrying out a one-way war of extermination was punctured by Iran's retaliation.
So I think with Trump's lie being exposed, with Israel feeling like it's in a race against time, and with Donald Trump's strike destroying the inspections regime, which limited Iran's nuclear enrichment, I think we're set for another phase of conflict that Trump has just unlocked with this foolish strike.
Here he is at his incoherent worst when he used the F-bomb.
Chris bleeped out the F-bomb.
Well, I thought this was pretty coherent, but yeah.
You can tell what it is.
Cut number 15. Israel, as soon as we made the deal, they came out and they dropped a load of bombs, the likes of which I've never seen before.
The biggest load that we've seen.
I'm not happy with Israel.
You know, when I say, okay, now you have 12 hours, you don't go out in the first hour and just drop everything you have on them.
So I'm not happy with them.
I'm not happy with Iran either.
But I'm really unhappy if Israel's going out this morning because of one rocket that didn't land, that was shot, perhaps by mistake, that didn't land.
I'm not happy about that.
We basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don't know what the f ⁇ they're doing.
Do you understand that?
Did Netanyahu cry, uncle, did he recognize the devastation that the Iranians had caused and how he and Mossad and the IDF had underestimated, some of them have said this publicly, I think Ben Gavir may have, how they underestimated the strength of Iran.
Did they call up Trump and say, you got to get us out of this mess that we started?
Well, first of all, in Trump's comments, that's the most daylight I've ever seen between the U.S. and Israel after Trump does what Israel wants.
You know, Bill Clinton privately complained.
Every president has hated Benjamin Netanyahu.
Bill Clinton privately stormed out of a meeting with him and said, you know, who's the effing superpower here?
Donald Trump's saying it openly.
He's like, we're the superpower.
what is this small little foreign country doing trying to interrupt my diplomacy?
And Steve Bannon is saying, It's a deception.
Well, he's trying to recover his dignity because he's under fire from his former chief of staff, Steve Bannon.
And it was Steve Bannon who actually said in his latest War Room broadcast that Israel needed the ceasefire, that Israel was threatened, that Israel was weak.
And Israel thought Anetanyahu was under the delusion that after assassinating Nasrallah, forcing a ceasefire with Hezbollah, after regime change in Syria two months after that, three months after that, that he could turn his attention to Iran and put Gaza on the back burner and just let the genocide simmer, and that he could score this devastating blow that would lead the U.S. into eliminating Iran's nuclear program.
That has failed.
In the first day of Israel's assault on Iran, Friday the 13th, it looked like Iran was completely unprepared, that they were stunned, and that they would not even be able to respond.
Hours later, over 100 ballistic missiles descended on Israel and penetrated the Iron Dome, the Arrow, the multi-billion dollar THAAD system, and U.S. destroyers were trying to dock down ballistic missiles.
They couldn't do it.
And with that, Israel's colonial psyche was penetrated.
And this continued day after day, Israelis experiencing some version of what Gaza had been experiencing for the first time.
They had to choose between possibly being buried under the rubble or sweaty night after night in the shelters.
And this really has shaken Netanyahu.
And meanwhile, in Gaza, because Israel had concentrated so much focus on Iran, the Israeli military has been on the run.
Western media isn't paying attention to this, but in Khan Yunus, Israeli military has been taking bodies day after day.
Yesterday, they lost seven soldiers in one incident.
So Netanyahu proclaimed that he would defeat Hamas by April 2024.
He proclaimed that he would achieve total victory.
He's put the hostage deal on the back burner, and they are still losing many soldiers in Gaza.
Hamas is still intact, and they are now claiming that they can defeat a regional power like Iran.
So I think Israel has been kind of exposed here.
And it all goes back to the theory that Hassan Nasrallah introduced after Hezbollah kicked the Israeli occupation army out of southern Lebanon in 2000, which is the spider web theory, which holds that because of the colonial nature of Jewish-Israeli society,
if it faces enough military pressure for enough time, that society will begin putting pressure on their military intelligence elite and their leadership to make serious political concessions.
And so Israel is doing everything possible militarily to avoid the core political concessions that will be necessary to secure its survival.
And one of those things that it thinks it can do is to continue to manipulate the U.S. into saving and protecting it.
But the American public has less appetite than ever, whether it's what we saw from Rohana and Thomas Massey teaming up on the war powers resolution, what we see from the podcasters on the right, like Theo Vaughan and Candace Owens,
or Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson in America First, or on the left with the election of Zohran Mamdani, a 33-year-old assembly member and influencer who has called for the arrest of Benjamin Netanyahu if he ever visits New York.
Israel has lost the American public.
Wow.
What damage has Netanyahu done to Israeli society?
I mean, this morning, well, it's afternoon now there.
Can you go out to the store?
Are the courts operating?
Can children go to school?
In Israel?
Yes.
Israel society, Jewish Israeli society was semi-functional from what I understood from people I know there throughout the war.
And it would sort of shut down around 6 p.m.
Restaurants would stop delivering.
People would go to their safe rooms in their house or their bunkers.
Now it's open again.
What we don't see in Israel is victory celebrations.
There is no great victory.
Israelis have been, Jewish Israelis have been at war for over 20 months now.
They're increasingly exhausted.
The reservist corps is depleted.
Israel's economy is suffering.
It would cost over $300 million a night to maintain this war, to keep up the air defenses, the interceptors, which were being depleted.
And Israel's due for another credit downgrade.
A major tech hub or tech center in Beershevo was struck.
The Microsoft offices were hit by a ballistic missile.
And this tech sector relies so much on foreign direct investment.
And foreign direct investment relies on Israel's air defenses to maintain a stable environment.
So we're going to see a weakening of Israel's middle class.
And I was reading an article in an Israeli economic publication, Calcalist, which said that some of the major Israeli innovations to come are better bomb shelters for the population, along with better surveillance tech.
So that's not a place that I think a lot of people want to live, especially Jews in the so-called diaspora aren't going to want to move there.
So the future looks increasingly dystopian and dark for Israeli society.
And again, their military leadership has said that there is no ceasefire and that they will seek to reignite this war.
What does that mean for people living in Israel who have basically become fodder for Netanyahu's total victory?
The future is not bright.
As Theodore Herzl said, but from a completely different angle, it is no dream.
What damage did Netanyahu do to himself by starting this war, never expecting the retaliation that he induced?
We're going to see a political upheaval in Israel after Netanyahu leaves the scene.
And I think it will lead to another spiderweb-like situation, but more intense, but one that resembled what we saw before October 7th in Israel, where Netanyahu was facing this full-on kind of almost civil war over judicial reform.
And it became sort of a war between the right-wing messianist camp and the Likud camp that supported Netanyahu and the enlightened public, what was left of the center and center left and the Ashkenazi elite.
And you had reservists refusing to show up for duty, including Air Force reservists, which was a significant role in weakening Israel and opening the door for an operation like Al-Aqsa flood on October 7th.
Israel was at a very weak point by October 7th, but the shock and casualties of October 7th brought Jewish Israelis from all different sectors to rally around the flag momentarily.
That's all gone now.
Netanyahu doesn't have any of that goodwill left, and Israel is set for a major political upheaval as soon as Netanyahu's coalition cracks.
But what Netanyahu has failed to do is achieve the greatest objective of his life, which is to bring about regime change in Iran.
And this is something we haven't talked about because we focus mostly on the nuclear issue.
Okay, the Defense Intelligence Agency has leaked this document showing that at best the U.S. set back Iran's nuclear program by a few months.
So that was a failure.
But what Israel has done by initiating this war and killing over 600 Iranians, almost mostly civilians, is set back the regime change plan, possibly decades.
There has been a huge rally around the flag effect in Iran.
Everyone I met while I was in Iran is now telling me that people who have deep grievances with the government supported the war were out in the streets chanting for the war.
And Iranians have come together.
They feel like it's another revolutionary moment.
The hybrid weapons of Western and Israeli regime change channels like Iran International, BBC Persia, the Western media are totally discredited inside Iran right now.
And so Netanyahu has achieved that.
And then finally, in the U.S., Netanyahu has achieved the disdain of a part of the American public that he always counted on as the most reliable part of his base, which is Republicans.
According to a new CNN poll, only 20% of Republicans under the age of 45 were enthusiastic about Trump's strike.
And, you know, look at what their influencers are saying.
They're just disgusted with the whole thing.
So politically and psychologically, Iran has won this round and Israel, it's a self-inflicted blow by Israel.
Chris has Just captured from about 30 minutes ago President Trump and Secretary Hegseth becoming irritated and defensive during the president's presser in Brussels.
And I can't wait to see it, so we're going to watch it together.
Chris?
If you look at the dates, it's just a few days after it happened.
So they didn't see it.
They said it may be very severe.
Understood.
Do you have a message for the intelligence community, though, in terms of unvarnished information getting to you?
That it's not.
I don't really have a message.
I would say issue the report when you know what happened.
I wouldn't say that it could be severe or maybe not.
They use the word severe.
It could be severe or maybe it's not.
So people like you picked up and said, oh, it's not severe.
No.
The report was not a complete report.
Yeah, the message was probably wait till you know the answer before you.
And would you not have a public component to your Zelensky meeting for a tactical reason with President Prince?
Hello, Mr. Secretary.
There's a reason the President calls out fake news for what it is.
These pilots, these refuelers, these fighters, these air defenders, the skill and the courage it took to go into enemy territory flying 36 hours on behalf of the American people and the world to take out a nuclear program is beyond what anyone in this audience can fathom.
And then the instinct, the instinct of CNN, the instinct of the New York Times, is to try to find a way to spin it for their own political reasons to try to hurt President Trump or our country.
They don't care what the troops think.
They don't care what the world thinks.
They want to spin it to try to make him look bad based on a leak.
Of course, we've all seen plenty of leakers.
And what do leakers do?
They have agendas.
And what do they do?
Do they share the whole information or just the part that they want to introduce?
And when they introduce that preliminary report that's deemed to be a low assessment, you know what a low assessment means?
Low confidence in the data in that report.
And why is there low confidence?
Because all of the evidence of what was just bombed by 12 30,000-pound bombs is buried under a mountain, devastated and obliterated.
So if you want to make an assessment of what happened at Ford, you better get a big shovel and go really deep because Iran's nuclear program is obliterated.
And somebody somewhere is trying to leak something to say, oh, with low confidence, we think maybe it's moderate.
Those that dropped the bombs precisely in the right place know exactly what happened when that exploded.
And you know who else knows?
Iran.
That's why they came to the table right away because their nuclear capabilities have been set back beyond what they thought were possible because of the courage of a commander-in-chief who led our troops despite what the fake news wants to say.
But you're not disputing the report said what it said.
I mean, that's a political statement, if ever I heard one.
There's very little truth in what he said.
He's made a fool of himself in an international forum with an enormous audience watching.
Well, he didn't present any facts.
He didn't present any evidence.
He didn't deny the assessment.
He's upset that the leakers work for him.
It's the Defense Intelligence Agency whose job it is to evaluate this that leaked, according to him, the absence of success because of the planning ahead of time by the Iranians.
No one's saying the bombs didn't hit.
No one's saying they didn't hit their target.
No one's saying that this is all a fake, but there was nothing there to hit except an empty tunnel.
Exactly.
And it is possible, actually, to reinforce to the point where those MOPs aren't going to actually destroy what's buried beneath the ground.
It is possible.
But Maxar satellite imagery showed days before a long line of dump trucks pulling up to the Ford facility.
Iran openly announced that it had removed its 60% enriched uranium stockpile.
Rafael Grossi, the heavily biased IAEA director, even on Fox News, said he doesn't know where the stockpile is.
Pete Hagseff is claiming that the entire nuclear program was destroyed.
According to the DIA assessment, the U.S. even failed to destroy the underground Isfahan facility.
It's not just Fordo.
And there are facilities all across Iran where that uranium, if Iran chooses, could be turned into a nuclear weapon to establish deterrence against the coming and inevitable future Israeli attacks.
It doesn't require a vast facility as long as there are plans and centrifuges to produce a nuclear weapon.
This is what Donald Trump has done by falling for the Israeli manipulation.
He has moved Iran outside the inspection regime permanently.
The IAEA is kicked out of Iran.
The Iranian parliament has passed legislation to do that.
And Iran may move to leave the NPT in order to establish deterrence once and for all.
Meanwhile, this scandal will only grow.
The intelligence, so-called intelligence community is disgusted with Trump's manipulation of intelligence, and the media that works hand in glove with them is going to seek to use this to punish Trump for weeks and weeks.
And I don't think they're going to have anything to come back with except more dodgy Israeli intelligence.
Hegg Seth should be ashamed of himself.
You have forgotten more than he's ever known.
Your grasp of these facts and ability to analyze and articulate them is spectacular, my dear friend.
Thank you very much.
I hadn't seen it before.
Chris said Max will love it and is texting me while we're on because Max will devour it and you surely did.
Thank you, my friend.
More great work by Chris.
Chris is unbelievable.
We'll see you again next week.
Thanks a lot, Judge.
All the best.
And coming up later today, Max was absolutely terrific.
Coming up later today, very soon, at 1 o'clock, Professor Glenn Deason.
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