July 7, 2025 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
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| Hi, everyone. | |
| Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. | |
| Today is Tuesday, July 8th, 2025. | |
| Ambassador Charles Freeman will be here with us in just a moment on Can Donald Trump Stop Benjamin Netanyahu. | |
| But first, this. | |
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| Ambassador Freeman, welcome here, my friend. | |
| We missed you last week. | |
| A lot of us did. | |
| And we're glad that you're able to be back with us. | |
| Before we get to an extended conversation about what you expect or think Prime Minister Netanyahu asked President Trump for last night at dinner, I want to explore your thoughts and your analysis of President Trump's policy on Ukraine. | |
| I mean, does he have a policy on Ukraine? | |
| Last week, the Secretary of Defense, you're very familiar with the Defense Department. | |
| Last week, the Secretary of Defense announced a delay or a holdup on four pieces of military equipment or four types of equipment that the Ukrainians want. | |
| The president said he knew nothing about it. | |
| Yesterday, he said he's resuming the shipments and sending more. | |
| I guess this is Donald Trump's war now. | |
| It seems to be. | |
| Of course, the reality is that we have overdrawn our military stocks. | |
| We can't really handle both the proxy war in Ukraine and the proxy war that Israel is conducting in the Levant. | |
| And so this is not a pleasant reality. | |
| Turns out we don't have the infinite capacity that the president sometimes seems to imagine we do. | |
| So where does this leave us with Ukraine? | |
| We are back with a Joe Biden spigot, I guess, flowing fully. | |
| We still have an American general and his team in Germany working with American intel who are all throughout Ukraine, helping them identify and locate Russian targets. | |
| We're still in this as deep as we were when Joe Biden was president. | |
| Is that a fair summary from your perspective, Ambassador? | |
| It sure seems so. | |
| You asked where we are. | |
| We're in a state of confusion. | |
| And that confusion includes going back on autopilot, apparently. | |
| It's not clear what all this is supposed to produce. | |
| It's directly contrary to the platform that the president has been campaigning on. | |
| But I guess it reflects realities. | |
| The question now really is, what is the impact if we're going to be supplying Ukraine with all kinds of things that the Defense Department was preparing to divert to Israel? | |
| What does that do to Israel? | |
| Here's President Trump last night at a dinner in the White House with Prime Minister Netanyahu and others from the Prime Minister's team and from Trump's inner circle. | |
| Apparently there were reporters there before the food was actually served and they asked Trump the question about whether or not he's going to send more weapons to Ukraine. | |
| Chris, cut number eight. | |
| Are you planning to send more weapons to Ukraine? | |
| We're going to send some more weapons. | |
| We have to. | |
| They have to be able to defend themselves. | |
| They're getting hit very hard now. | |
| They're getting hit very hard. | |
| We're going to have to send more weapons. | |
| You have defensive weapons primarily, but they're getting hit very, very hard. | |
| So many people are dying in that mess. | |
| Well, he could stop it with a phone call or poke the elbow of the guy next to him and say, you know, let's end this. | |
| But he chooses to continue to send weapons. | |
| I wonder what his conversation with President Putin was like, the conversation he said displeased Trump very much. | |
| Well, there was a statement by Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, very able foreign minister, a detailed statement laying out the Russian position on ending the war in Ukraine. | |
| And it turns out it hasn't varied at all since December 2021, when the Russians issued an ultimatum and then February 22 implemented it when there was no response, no openness to negotiation or discussion in the West. | |
| So on that level, nothing has changed. | |
| it's not clear what the president thought the Russians were willing to do or why this war occurred and therefore had a real strategy for stopping it. | |
| It hasn't stopped. | |
| It's gone on. | |
| And apparently, as you said, we're back in it. | |
| Scott Ritter has referred to or analogized Ukraine to a hospice patient just being made comfortable, but waiting for the end to come. | |
| Do you share that analogy? | |
| Yes, if you add in the adoring relatives who are in denial about the situation of the patient, yes, that's probably a good analogy. | |
| You know, Ukraine is really on the ropes. | |
| And I guess what we're seeing with this flip-flop by the president is an unwillingness to take responsibility, to accept accountability for Ukraine not dying, but having to make its peace with Russia on Russian terms. | |
| We all know what the conditions are for the Russians to cease their special military operation. | |
| As you pointed out, Ambassador, they haven't changed one iota from February 22 to July of 25. | |
| Yet President Trump says he was upset with President Putin during their phone call last week. | |
| Do you think President Trump understands what's going on, understands the Russian mind, understands his counterpart? | |
| There's no evidence he does. | |
| He's focused on a ceasefire. | |
| That's something that the losing side always wants. | |
| We are losing in Ukraine. | |
| There's no, the ceasefire does not include any terms that satisfy the Russian conditions, which involve the three conditions, protection for Russian speakers in Ukraine, | |
| or now the incorporation, recognition of the incorporation of the four Eastern Oblast plus Crimea into Russia, the neutralization of Ukraine and a firm commitment that it will not pose a military threat to Russia. | |
| And third, a broader discussion of European security architecture that would reduce the fears that Russia has of Western attack while reducing Western fears of Russian attack. | |
| These are the three conditions. | |
| They've been there from the beginning, and we've consistently refused to discuss them. | |
| Most recently, we've been in apparent denial about them and focused just on a ceasefire, which is, you know, a band-aid, not a cure for the wound. | |
| It's almost inconceivable that Donald Trump doesn't understand what you've just articulated. | |
| Foreign Minister Lavrov and his boss, President Putin, have not deviated one iota from their very rational demands. | |
| I don't even know if Trump understands the origin of the special military operation, which of course is the American CIA in 2014. | |
| The CIA plus the National Endowment for Democracy, which is apparently back in business, but no longer transparent. | |
| Wow. | |
| Meaning still being funded by the CIA, but not under that name. | |
| So being funded by Congress, but not listing the recipients of its largesse anymore. | |
| It's gone dark, basically. | |
| And we have to remember that that organization was originally conceived as an alternative to covert action by the CIA when the church committee investigated the CIA, found all sorts of legal delinquencies, and we moved some of the covert action out into the sunlight. | |
| Apparently, it's gone back into the dark now. | |
| I'm going to transition into Israel. | |
| Chris, do we have the clip of Tucker Carlson interrogating a senior senator from Texas? | |
| Now, you may have seen this. | |
| Ted Cruz shows an unbelievable, remarkable, almost crazed naivete about the commands from the Old Testament controlling his hands today. | |
| Watch this. | |
| Growing up in Sunday school, I was taught from the Bible, those who bless Israel will be blessed, and those who curse Israel will be cursed. | |
| So that's in the Bible. | |
| As a Christian, I believe that. | |
| Where is that? | |
| I can find it to you. | |
| I don't have the scripture off the tip of my fingers. | |
| It's in Genesis. | |
| Where does my support for Israel come from? | |
| Number one, because biblically we're commanded to support Israel. | |
| But number two, hold on, you're a senator. | |
| We are commanded to support Israel. | |
| And what does that mean? | |
| We're told those who bless Israel will be blessed. | |
| Hold on, define Israel. | |
| This is important. | |
| Are you kidding me? | |
| This is what Jordan Christian define Israel. | |
| Do you not know what Israel is? | |
| He's talking about the nation of Israel. | |
| He had nations exists, and he's discussing a nation. | |
| A nation was the people of Israel. | |
| He's the nation. | |
| In Genesis, is that the same as the country run by Benjamin Netanyahu right now? | |
| Yes. | |
| It is. | |
| Has the same undergraduate education that I do at Princeton and the same law school education that you do At Harvard, and he seems to think that God the Father has told posterity to follow Benjamin Netanyahu. | |
| Yes, well, you know, there's a famous remark by a scholar of Israeli history, himself Jewish, who said that the founders of Zionism did not believe in God, but were convinced that he had given them Palestine. | |
| You know, so this is nonsense. | |
| Israel is in the Bible is an idea. | |
| It is an idea. | |
| It's in the Quran, too, by the way. | |
| The children of Israel are the exemplars of morality in the Holy Quran. | |
| So to equate this with the modern state of Israel, which was founded by atheists and which follows a completely amoral policy is really quite a twist. | |
| Politically advantageous, I guess. | |
| I guess it is politically advantageous for him to say that in Texas, I don't mean to demean the people of Texas, but anybody that agrees with him will probably have a tendency to vote for him. | |
| What do you think Netanyahu came for yesterday, aside from flattering the president and ostentatiously on national television, handing him what purported to be a copy of a letter he sent to the Nobel Peace Prize Committee recommending the president, probably the kiss of death for that nomination coming from Netanyahu, at least the same, almost the same human beings, not quite, but the same mentality that indicted him for war crimes. | |
| Nevertheless, what do you think he came for yesterday? | |
| What was he asking Trump for? | |
| What is he trying to persuade Trump of? | |
| It's time to bomb Iran again? | |
| No, I think that Israel is in real trouble after the exchange of fire with Iran. | |
| It was running out of interception capability. | |
| Some people say another week or two and it would have been flattened, basically. | |
| It suffered huge damage, which it's managed to conceal mostly because of military censorship. | |
| But more and more of that is coming out. | |
| You know, about 41,000 claims of property damage, a huge number of wounded people, major institutions like the Weizmann Institute, Dimona, the nuclear center, various Mossad and Amman military intelligence centers destroyed. | |
| The ports of Haifa and Ashdod basically put out of commission for a while. | |
| This was a serious Iranian retaliation, and it's the first that Israel's ever experienced. | |
| And Israel needs reconstitution. | |
| And where is it going to get it? | |
| It's going to get it from Donald Trump in the United States, if history is any guide. | |
| But I think the main point of this meeting, pretty clearly from Netanyahu's point, was to demonstrate to the people of Israel that he has the backing of Donald Trump and the United States. | |
| So this was, in this case, as is so often the case, the meeting was the message. | |
| One could talk about what went on between the two of them, but basically they're talking about a phony ceasefire. | |
| This is a ceasefire proposal negotiated between the United States and Israel, in which the Palestinians are not involved. | |
| Essentially, it's setting terms for the surrender of the Palestinians and the extermination of Hamas. | |
| And it's not surprising that Hamas doesn't find this a very attractive proposal. | |
| I think on the Israeli side also, it's worth noting that once again, in a 60-day ceasefire proposal, Israel has not committed to do anything but go back to war at the end of the so-called ceasefire. | |
| So this is setting the terms for Palestinian surrender. | |
| And the Palestinians have spent the last 75 years refusing to surrender. | |
| I don't think they're going to do it now. | |
| Here are some headlines from newspapers in Israel this morning from Ha-Aretz. | |
| Look at the words that Chris has underlined, concentration camp. | |
| Defense minister says Israel plans to concentrate all Gaza's population in a humanitarian zone built on Rafa's ruins, times of Israel. | |
| Plans said to outline humanitarian transit camps to house Gazans before possible relocation. | |
| One of the retired IDF juniors, much to Prime Minister Netanyahu's chagrin, referred to Gaza as an open air concentration camp. | |
| I guess these are plans to build a closed air concentration camp. | |
| Pretty much. | |
| History is full of ironies. | |
| Of course, it was the British who invented the concentration camp. | |
| They did that during their war with the Afrikaners in South Africa. | |
| And Afrikaners, of course, were the inventors of apartheid. | |
| Israel has learned from the South African example and perfected it in a sense, made it even worse. | |
| And then we're into concentration camps for Palestinians by people who themselves are the descendants of Nazi concentration camp inmates. | |
| You can't make this stuff up. | |
| No, no, you can't. | |
| And then irony is almost not a strong enough word to describe it. | |
| Here's a member of Prime Minister Netanyahu, who's governing coalition. | |
| He's a member of the Knesset. | |
| This is horrific, but here's what he said two days ago, Chris Cut number one. | |
| The war we are fighting today, which we embarked on the 7th of October, is a war against a Nazi enemy that threatened the existence of the Jewish people in the land of Israel. | |
| That is the whole truth. | |
| So the Prime Minister decided to do it sequentially. | |
| I'm with him. | |
| No problem, let's do it sequentially. | |
| You eliminated Hezbollah, you dealt a severe blow, maybe even more than that, to Iran. | |
| Now the time has come to deal with the Gaza Strip. | |
| How do we do that? | |
| You take off the gloves, stop the humanitarian aid, cut off electricity, cut off water, start destroying, and expel voluntarily, so to speak, voluntary migration to Gazans. | |
| There are no uninvolved people there, no innocents, no one who isn't guilty. | |
| As far as I'm concerned, they're all Hamas members. | |
| At the end of the war, there should be two images in the Gaza Strip. | |
| First, not a single Gazan remains, and all 50 of our hostages, 49 male hostages, and one female hostage, both living and deceased there, returned to the state of Israel. | |
| Is this just the rantings of a right-wing fanatic, or is this a generally accepted view amongst the Israeli population? | |
| Well, it's both the best impersonation of a Nazi that I've ever seen. | |
| And it does represent the government policy of Israel. | |
| That's why they're talking about building concentration camps as a way station to expelling the Palestinians from that part of Palestine. | |
| Meanwhile, of course, while no one's watching, they're busily expelling everybody from the West Bank. | |
| There's quite an effort going on there to achieve what is called transfer, which is ethnic cleansing and expulsion. | |
| So, you know, one of the crazy things that's been going on is that normally when you deal with genocide, you have great trouble demonstrating intent. | |
| But there's no question about the intent. | |
| You just heard it. | |
| That is, as I've said, the best demonstration of Nazi-like thinking that you could possibly imagine. | |
| And it is now the majority opinion in Israel. | |
| Is the director of the CIA, John Radcliffe, a Mossad asset? | |
| He is a politician, and his bread is buttered by the agents of Israel who are unregistered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, APAC, Zionist Organization of America, a lot of others. | |
| We know from documentary evidence that a great number of the organizations in the United States that defend the Israeli policies and that try to discredit anyone who speaks critically of Israel or advocates self-determination for anyone other than Jews in Israel. | |
| And, you know, we know that all this is paid for by the Ministry of Strategic Affairs in Israel. | |
| And yet, our Foreign Agents Registration Act exempts these organizations from registration. | |
| Very tortured reasoning and really untenable. | |
| But it's a demonstration of the power of the Zionist lobby in the United States. | |
| Yesterday, the president gave a little history lesson, which in my view, I suspect in yours, shows seriously, seriously defective thinking and understanding, but it's not that long. | |
| Let's listen to it. | |
| Chris, cut number 10. | |
| They flew for 37 hours with zero problem mechanically. | |
| I mean, when you think in carrying the biggest bombs ever, the biggest bombs that we've ever dropped on anybody, when you think, non-nuclear. | |
| And we want to keep it non-nuclear, by the way. | |
| But they did a phenomenal job. | |
| It was an amazing job. | |
| And I think that was, I was talking to Beebe about it before. | |
| That was the very beginning of the end. | |
| It ended very quickly after that. | |
| I don't want to say what it reminded me of, but if you go back a long time ago, it reminded people of a certain other event. | |
| And Harry Truman's picture is now in the lobby in a nice location of the lobby where it should have been, but that stopped a lot of fighting. | |
| And this stopped a lot of fighting. | |
| When that happened, it was a whole different vote. | |
| That's delusional, I have to say. | |
| That's not what happened. | |
| What happened was Israel basically cried, uncle. | |
| Iran had always said it would cease fire on Israel if Israel ceased fire on it. | |
| Israel was persuaded to cease fire on Iran, and Iran was true to its word. | |
| I think the performative elements of this dropping of a 30,000-pound bomb on several, actually about 70% of our inventory of them were dropped on Iran. | |
| The performative actions of that, that that represented, were then reciprocated by the Iranians by telling everyone at Al-Adaid Air Base in Qatar to get out of the way while they carried out a performative strike on it. | |
| So, of course, it's true that the bombing by Israel, the bombing by the United States, did set back the Iranian nuclear program. | |
| But my guess is that Iran had clandestine sites prepared, that it relocated the enriched uranium it had, not only to Natan, which was bombed, but elsewhere. | |
| And this whole episode greatly strengthened that voice of the hardliners in Iran who have advocated going, building a nuclear weapon. | |
| And my guess is that Iran is now probably doing the enrichment to weapons grade, not quite making a POM because the fatwa, the religious scruples that have inhibited making a POM remain in place. | |
| And Iranians would still like to do normalized relations with the West and especially the United States. | |
| But I think they're probably clandestinely enriching now. | |
| So, what we've done is take a non-existent bomb and bring it much closer to existence. | |
| And Trump praises one of the most shameful acts in American history, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on Japan within days of surrendering anyway. | |
| Here's Professor Paolo Nogueira, the former head of the International Monetary Fund. | |
| You may know him, Chris Cutt number six. | |
| Iran is not only a very important country by itself in all respects, but it is a link between Russia and India. | |
| It is a link, possible link between Middle East oil and China, bypassing the Strait of Hormuz. | |
| So Iran is strategically very important. | |
| And that perhaps is in the minds of Americans and Israelis when they are permanently hostile to Iran. | |
| Now, Iran should have had an atomic bomb a long time ago, in my opinion. | |
| Because this is deterrence acting. | |
| Iran failed to do that, tried to cooperate, and now it has learned a lesson, I presume, and will go for a full-scale nuclear program, in my opinion. | |
| Let's see. | |
| What do you think? | |
| I think Mr. Nervera is onto something. | |
| Basically, what we have done is validate North Korea's response to maximum pressure, which was to build an ICBM capable of striking the United States with a nuclear weapon. | |
| I wouldn't be surprised to see Iran now develop an ICBM for the same purpose, because the lesson is, unless you have a nuclear weapon, as Pyongyang has developed, you're going to get Libyanized. | |
| You're going to get overrun. | |
| You're going to get attacked at will by those more powerful than you. | |
| So I think he's probably correct. | |
| I think it is actually quite extraordinary that given decades of provocation, going back to the early 1980s, about 1984, by Prime Minister Netanyahu and other Israeli politicians, as well as their American camp followers, that Iran has not developed a nuclear weapon. | |
| And I think probably we've provided those resisting doing that with the coup de grace. | |
| Ambassador Freeman, thank you very much. | |
| Thanks for your analysis. | |
| Deeply appreciated. | |
| Thanks for accommodating my schedule by joining us at this hour. | |
| We'll look forward to seeing you again next week, my friend. | |
| Thank you. |
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