July 8, 2025 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
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| Hi, everyone. | |
| Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. | |
| Today is Wednesday, July 9th, 2025. | |
| My dear friend, Max Blumenthal joins us now. | |
| Max, thank you for accommodating my schedule. | |
| I want to spend some time with you on Prime Minister Netanyahu's visit to Capitol Hill. | |
| He spent a day in the White House, was there for two days, actually, and some time on Capitol Hill in the Capitol, meeting members of Congress. | |
| Was this about his domestic political needs and the photo ops that will help him? | |
| In many ways, it was. | |
| It was about flattering Trump, nominating Trump for the Nobel Prize, which is the kiss of death, meaning he won't get it. | |
| I believe Pakistan had nominated Trump for the Nobel Prize 24 hours before he bombed Iran. | |
| It was also about Netanyahu getting Trump's consent for turning Gaza into some kind of concentration camp, which Netanyahu's defense minister had announced the day before, and quote-unquote voluntary migration. | |
| The real focus is on Gaza right now. | |
| It was about a permanent war. | |
| It was about getting consent for Netanyahu or Israel in general to continue the Lebanon option, not just in Lebanon, where it's violated the ceasefire 4,000 times, but also Iran if Netanyahu is seeking permission to wage strikes in Iran with U.S. assistance, U.S. guidance systems, if Iran attempts to reconstitute its nuclear program. | |
| But ultimately, this was about Netanyahu staying in the limelight, remaining on the world stage, being close to Trump, which has domestic repercussions for Netanyahu. | |
| And what's so fascinating about this, just one more point, is Netanyahu never speaks to the Israeli press. | |
| He almost never speaks to Israeli journalists, although he manipulates the Israeli press. | |
| And on this trip, he uses it kind of as a stage to speak back to the Israeli public, but he's avoided one of the most important American journalists who just interviewed the Iranian president, Mahmoud Pazeshkian. | |
| That's Tucker Carlson, who has tried on four occasions to interview Netanyahu, and he has avoided him. | |
| I would imagine Netanyahu is fearful of being interviewed by our mutual friend, especially after what he did to Ted Cruz. | |
| He made him look ridiculous. | |
| Well, he helped Cruz make himself look ridiculous. | |
| Is Netanyahu in trouble politically at home? | |
| Do the Israeli people blame the destruction of one-third of their country on his ill-guided attack on Iran? | |
| Well, the Israeli public supported that attack on Iran, and so did the opposition. | |
| And you saw one of the key opposition figures, Netanyahu's former defense minister, Yoav Golan, actually co-author a piece with the colonial cheerleader Niall Ferguson supporting those strikes. | |
| Pretty much the entire Israeli political spectrum lined up in favor of Netanyahu attacking Iran. | |
| I think 85% of the Jewish-Israeli public supported the attack on Iran. | |
| None of them expected the ferocity or destruction of the retaliation, did they? | |
| Well, this is more of a debate inside Iran right now, and it's a quiet debate. | |
| But people I know inside Iran have mixed feelings about what took place, not because they thought they were resoundingly defeated by Israel, but many of them think that they should have kept going, that they had Israel's number, and that they would have been able to establish much stronger deterrence if the war had lasted longer than 12 days, and that Israel was actually losing the war of attrition. | |
| That's the way many from Iran saw it. | |
| And they're kind of being facing pressure to basically be quiet. | |
| The Iranian government wanted, it seems clear from Pazeshkian's interview with Tucker, the tone he struck for the American public, that the government wanted to keep negotiations open. | |
| And that's how the reformist side in Iran sees it. | |
| So from my point of view, I think they have a point. | |
| Israel was suffering. | |
| Yes. | |
| And the United States, and Trump has even said this himself. | |
| And Steve Bannon, his former chief of staff, said it. | |
| They saved Israel from a real disaster because Israel started an open-ended conflict that it could not finish. | |
| Here's the Iranian foreign minister. | |
| I'm not sure if he's speaking at the... | |
| I'm not sure where he is speaking. | |
| It appears as though it's the United Nations Security Council, but it's not. | |
| But he's making some very, very interesting statements about the rule of law. | |
| Chris, cut number seven. | |
| What the Israeli regime and subsequently the United States committed were no less than an unprecedented breach of international peace. | |
| The fact that the developing non-nuclear weapon state has been attacked by two nuclear-armed regimes with the support of at least two more nuclear-armed states that are also permanent members of the United Nations Security Council is only appalling and extremely consequential. | |
| No rule of law or logic allows anyone to target the IAA monitored peaceful nuclear facilities of another state simply out of speculation that the facilities may sometimes be used for weaponisation. | |
| Mr President, my people stayed steadfast and resolved in defence of our homeland against these blatant acts of aggression, and the aggressors had to cease their criminal attacks following the heroic resistance of our strong armed forces. | |
| We will definitely continue to defend with all force against any future aggressions. | |
| But this is not over. | |
| As long as the Israeli regime's lawless behaviour is supported and justified by its backers and apologists, it is a shame that the international community has been unable to do anything meaningful to end the genocide of Palestinians for the past two years and stop Israel from occupying Arab lands in its vicinity. | |
| He was at the BRICS conference in Rio de Janeiro, but addressing via remote the UN Security Council. | |
| What did you think? | |
| Well, the UN Security Council, I mean, the UN itself has proven worthless, and Iran has just left the IAEA, which I'll discuss in a second. | |
| But this is Abbas Aragji appealing to the emerging multipolar world for support diplomatically and probably suggesting a call for military support in what could be the next phase of this conflict with Israel, | |
| because Europe had supported, effectively supported, obviously along with the United States, a criminal, unprovoked attack that violated every precept of international law against Iran, killing off-duty commanders, nuclear scientists, civilians in a surprise attack that also was waged by Mossad sleeper cells. | |
| China's Xi was not present at BRICS, nor was Vladimir Putin. | |
| I think if Putin had taken that long trip, there was a chance, I don't know, there could have been some sabotage of his plane. | |
| There is an ICC warrant, which did not apply to Netanyahu, who had just flown to Washington, actually flying directly over Rome, where the Rome Statute was signed with the permission of the Greek president, the Italian prime minister, and I believe the British PM, Kier Starmer, all the way to the U.S. in violation of his ICC warrant. | |
| So Aragchi is appealing to this part of the world, the multipolar world, to support international, support Iran diplomatically. | |
| But also, I mean, there's talk of Iran seeking China's HQ-9B air defenses, which scored a blow against India for Pakistan in those two countries' conflict. | |
| And there are reports that Iran is also seeking J-10 multi-role fighter jets from China. | |
| These could be game changers in establishing deterrence for Iran if China's willing to supply them. | |
| China's denied reports that it's supplying the air defense systems, but Russia was supposed to supply its newest line of Sukhoi fighters, and they're delaying with Iran. | |
| And so Iran is turning to China increasingly for support and has historical enmity with Russia. | |
| You can't blame Iran for wanting to leave the IAEA. | |
| It became an arm of the Mossad. | |
| Well, it always has been, or it has been for years. | |
| And we know this thanks to Private Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange. | |
| If you actually go back to 2009, there are some really significant leaks about the IAEA and its incoming director, Yukia Amano. | |
| It turns out that according to those leaks, Jeffrey Piat, I don't know if you remember him, he was the U.S. diplomat who was on the line with Victoria Newland plotting the coup in the Maidan in 2014, basically saying who was going to be the leader of Ukraine after they overthrow its elected government. | |
| Before that, he was prior to being U.S. ambassador in Kiev, he was the U.S. charge at the IAEA. | |
| And there are State Department cables showing him, stating that Amano has promised that he will be on the American side, they can support his nomination, and that he will maintain ambiguity in public, but do what the U.S. wants in private, particularly on Iran. | |
| This is 2009. | |
| Amano was then replaced by Grossi after suffering a mysterious illness and dying. | |
| And Grossi, Rafael Grossi, the current director of the IAEA, has announced his intention to run for Secretary General of the United Nations. | |
| If you want to be the head of the UN, you need the U.S. on your side. | |
| You need Germany and all the European powers, basically P5 plus 1, who were in charge of negotiating with Iran when, in fact, the IAEA as a multilateral institution should have been in charge. | |
| And so Grossi clearly has been groomed as well by the United States and by Israel for this role and was never going to be an honest broker with Iran. | |
| And it's obvious because of what he did just days before Israel attacked. | |
| He introduced a resolution for the first time declaring Iran in violation of the Nonproliferation Treaty, which set the stage for Israel to stage this attack and claim that they're rescuing the world from Iran's evil nuclear program. | |
| Will Netanyahu be satisfied with anything less Than Iran becoming like Libya or Syria? | |
| No. | |
| Israel will be at war for the rest of our lives until every country surrounding it is completely neutered and reduced to a backwater like Jordan. | |
| Jordan being the Hashemite-run neo-colony, which actually claimed credit for taking down 20% of Iran's ballistic missiles fired towards Israel. | |
| That's what Israel wants. | |
| And it intends to do it through, obviously, through genocide in Gaza, through constant bombing in Lebanon until it exhausts Hezbollah and forces some kind of civil war there. | |
| I could go into more detail. | |
| It did that through, Netanyahu has claimed credit for regime change in Syria, which has reduced Syria to a despotic hellhole run by a former al-Qaeda figure who is now desperate for Western support. | |
| And Iran is next, obviously, on the target board, along with Yemen. | |
| Israel has been bombing Yemen consistently for the last week, but it can't seem to take out those pesky Houthis. | |
| But it's endless. | |
| It's just endless warfare until it can consolidate its dream, which will come through the Abraham Accords. | |
| The Abraham Accords require the full compliance of the Gulf states, the wealthiest supposedly Arab countries. | |
| And those countries, the United Arab Emirates, Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, after paying Trump a trillion dollars, they wound up seeing the U.S. bomb Iran and get them targeted with Iranian ballistic missiles. | |
| They saw Israel being given far too much latitude and far too much power to enter into a partnership with that country. | |
| And I think they're a little bit frightened at this point of the Abraham Accords. | |
| I think what they witnessed with the amount of support that Trump has given to Israel has set the Abraham Accords back, as has the Gaza genocide, which is anything but complete. | |
| If you saw what happened in Beit Hanoun two days ago, 14 Israeli soldiers severely wounded, five killed in one attack. | |
| The resistance is still fighting, and Israel has no way of dislodging them after almost two years of reducing Gaza to rubble. | |
| Here is, I don't know if you know this fellow, a member of the Knesset by the name of Zivka. | |
| Zivka Fogel. | |
| Speaker Fogel, yeah. | |
| Right. | |
| Sounding like he's a member of the Nazi high command. | |
| Chris 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, 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. | |
| Does this mentality deny the personhood, the humanity of Palestinians? | |
| Well, it's nice to have this for the future Gaza Holocaust Museum. | |
| And if there were international law for any future prosecutions, which we don't see taking place anytime soon, Zavika Fogel is really speaking to the Jewish Israeli public, which according to there are many polls. | |
| A recent one from Penn State shows that the vast majority of Jewish Israelis hold genocidal attitudes and see no distinction between the civilians of Gaza and Hamas. | |
| So he's appealing for popularity. | |
| And he's also articulating a plan that is essentially in place now that the defense minister, Yitzhak Katz, Israel Katz, has announced a concentration camp to be built in southern Gaza where 600,000 | |
| people from the Mawasi zone, which is basically an area of internally replaced, displaced refugees living in tents, will be put into a biometric prison in southern Gaza that they won't be allowed to leave. | |
| There will be four aid distribution hubs inside this concentration camp supplied by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which is run by American mercenaries and Reverend Johnny Moore, who's a Trump crony, a Christian Zionist Trump crony, but it's basically a front for Israel. | |
| And that will be expanded, that system will be expanded throughout Gaza as people in Gaza are incentivized to leave. | |
| It's about ethnic cleansing ultimately, because what is Gaza? | |
| Gaza is a reflection of the ethno-supremacist logic of Zionism, where most of its inhabitants prior to October 7th had been forced off the land of what is now called Israel. | |
| Over 85% were refugees, living in an open-air prison. | |
| They were restive. | |
| They were resisting. | |
| And they threatened the demographic purity of the state of Israel if they came back. | |
| So Gaza was just this warehouse. | |
| And now Israel has the opportunity to clear out the warehouse of surplus humanity by pushing them into Egypt or Europe or somewhere else And then taking as much land as they can in Gaza, and then the demographic problem is relieved. | |
| So, what we're seeing through the comments of Sviko Fogel, the Nazi-like comments of Sviko Fogel, is how the logic of Zionism perpetuates the Holocaust on the backs of Palestinians almost endlessly. | |
| Switching gears, because this is such a hot story this morning, was Jeffrey Epstein a Mossad asset? | |
| Well, Alex Acosta, the Florida prosecutor, declared him to be, said that he belonged to intelligence. | |
| I think he was told to basically retract that comment. | |
| A Saudi passport or Saudi ID card was found in Jeffrey Epstein's belongings, among his belongings after he died or supposedly committed suicide. | |
| His partner, his wingwoman, Ghelane Maxwell, who was convicted of trafficking minors to him exclusively, not to anyone else, was the daughter of Robert Maxwell, who received practically a state funeral in Israel. | |
| Had Mossad chiefs at his funeral. | |
| And his last phone call was to Samuel Pesar, who was the stepfather of Tony Blinken, who is his fixer, who is also the head of the French Jewish lobby. | |
| Robert Maxwell was definitely a Mossad agent. | |
| So there are all these connections to Jeffrey Epstein through the Mossad. | |
| But really, ultimately, maybe Jeffrey Epstein's ultimate legacy was helping elect Trump by convincing a bunch of low IQ MAGA dupes that Trump was going to take on the deep state and release all these Epstein files. | |
| And at the end of the day, as Trump himself said, Trump didn't want to ruin a bunch of lives by releasing what he considered phony material, which could have come back and harmed him. | |
| No one was closer in U.S. politics to Jeffrey Epstein than Donald Trump. | |
| Why did anyone think that Donald Trump was going to be the one to expose the Epstein network? | |
| Well, they were dupes. | |
| They were bamboozled. | |
| They were took. | |
| They were the butt of a P.T. Barnum joke. | |
| And now, I mean, I just look at them and laugh as I see this gigantic online social media meltdown of MAGA. | |
| Here's Trump yesterday at a cabinet meeting, very defensive. | |
| Chris has edited this down. | |
| Very defensive when this issue was raised. | |
| Chris. | |
| Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein? | |
| This guy's been talked about for years. | |
| That is unbelievable. | |
| Do you want to waste the time? | |
| Do you feel like answering? | |
| I don't mind answering. | |
| I mean, I can't believe you're asking a question on Epstein. | |
| In February, I did an interview on Fox, and it's been getting a lot of attention because I said, I was asked a question about the client list, and my response was, it's sitting on my desk to be reviewed. | |
| Also, to the tens of thousands of video, never going to be released, never going to see the light of day. | |
| To him being an agent, I have no knowledge about that. | |
| We can get back to you on that. | |
| And that's it on Epstein. | |
| Well, she has driven a wedge down the middle of MAGA because you're right. | |
| Many, many people believed Trump ordered it released. | |
| A federal judge ordered it released. | |
| She herself ordered it released. | |
| Now they're saying the list doesn't exist. | |
| I don't think people that are involved in this issue believe that, but I'm just fascinated with Epstein's international connections and you just outlined them. | |
| I forgot about Robert Maxwell. | |
| Well, hey, maybe there's nothing there. | |
| Maybe they couldn't find anything. | |
| That's a possibility. | |
| But Pam Bondi said that there was this black book showing that hundreds of people had been involved in raping minors. | |
| She said this on camera. | |
| Yes. | |
| So did Dan Bongino. | |
| And he said it's going to take down the Democrats, you know, the Clinton network. | |
| He said this again and again when he was on his Rumble show. | |
| And now he's deputy director of the FBI. | |
| So it looks like obviously a gigantic bait and switch to dupe Trump supporters. | |
| And then Donald Trump has to shut the whole thing down because, I mean, Donald Trump was, Donald Trump allowed NBC to come into a party and film him partying with Jeffrey Epstein and Buffalo Bill's cheerleaders while Trump commented, whispering in Jeffrey Epstein's ear that, you know, certain cheerleaders were hot. | |
| The cheerleaders were like grinding on Donald Trump and he was dancing with them and showcasing himself as this great Lothario. | |
| And Jeffrey Epstein was right there by his side. | |
| There's photos of Bill Clinton with Jeffrey Epstein. | |
| There's, you know, Clinton's on the on the logs on the Lolita Express, but there's nothing as vivid as the footage of Trump with Epstein. | |
| Epstein also talked about his friendship with Trump to the reporter Michael Wolf. | |
| There are damning audio recordings. | |
| And the Democrats never did anything with this. | |
| I said on Twitter yesterday, or ex before Grock had a complete Hitlerian meltdown, I said that this should have been the focus of the Democrats' attacks. | |
| Kamala should have brought it up in every debate. | |
| Trump Epstein was real, but instead they focus on Trump Russia, which was a gigantic hoax and it had no currency among voters. | |
| Trump Epstein would have hurt Trump among young males, among women, among all these groups he won among the Democrats, but the Democrats wouldn't touch it for some reason. | |
| And the reason is because the Democrats were also on Epstein's books. | |
| So this is a scandal that I think helps discredit the two-party system. | |
| And we will see Trump as he exonerates Epstein and all of the people supposedly in Epstein's Black book continue to focus on arresting the poor in Home Depot parking lots and throwing them in private prisons run by Geo Group, the top private prison contractor in the country whose former top lobbyist was seated right next to Donald Trump in that briefing, Pam Bondi. | |
| And border czar Tom Homan was a highly paid consultant to Geo Group. | |
| So what I'm saying is the Trump administration has nothing to gain financially out of releasing the Epstein files. | |
| And that's all they seem to really care about. | |
| And so they're going to focus on their bottom line and enriching Trump's family. | |
| Who's the person that you refer to as seated next to Attorney General Bondi? | |
| No, no, I'm talking about Bondi herself. | |
| She was a top lobbyist. | |
| Oh, I'm sorry. | |
| I misunderstood that. | |
| You're right. | |
| You're right. | |
| Perhaps the least qualified Attorney General in the modern era, but an iota more qualified competition there than Matt Gaetz. | |
| The original. | |
| I would have loved to have seen Matt Gates in this role, like as Trump tries to disappear the Epstein files. | |
| Max, only you can touch these things with your delicate touch. | |
| Thank you very much. | |
| Thanks for all we've been through. | |
| Thank you for accommodating my schedule. | |
| All the best. | |
| We'll see you again soon. | |
| Thanks a lot, Judge. | |
| Of course. | |
| And coming up later today, maybe a little bit more about Epstein, but mainly Iran and Israel, Colonel Larry Wilkerson at one o'clock. |
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