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July 13, 2025 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
28:00
Scott Ritter :
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Hi, everyone.
Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
Today is Monday, July 14th, 2025.
Scott Ritter will be with us in just a moment on Germany.
Is it marching to war?
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Scott, welcome here, my dear friend.
Thank you for accommodating my schedule.
Before we discuss your research and observations about Germany and some of the latest nonsense from Lindsey Graham, President Trump just a few minutes ago announced a rather seismic shift in his thinking,
an increase in the amount of military weapons, or it sounds, he's so imprecise at times, like an increase in arms to Ukraine via a circuitous route of European nations.
What is this going to accomplish?
Excuse my language, but not a damn thing.
I mean, this is stupidity in the extreme.
First of all, notice who's running this.
It ain't Pete Hedek Seth.
It's not the State Department.
The CIA is running this, which tells you right off the bat that this is non-standard.
It's a knee-jerk reaction that requires, you know, it's done outside of normal procurement channels.
Where's the money coming from?
Things of that nature.
It's sleight of hand.
There's nothing specific.
What's the training associated with this?
I mean, 17 batteries.
People need to put on their thinking caps sometime when they hear this president open his mouth.
17 batteries.
The full compliment, he said.
Does Ukraine have 17 batteries worth of soldiers trained?
Who's going to train them?
We know Spain has a battery dedicated for training Ukrainians.
What's a battery, Scotty?
A firing battery for the Patriot will be, I think, up to three launchers together with associated radars.
The launchers will have, I guess it's a quad, four, you know, four pods on them to fire off.
So, you know, you're talking, I think, for a 12, you know, between 12 and 16 missiles ready to fire per battery.
You know, it's not an insignificant amount.
Right now in Ukraine, the total they've ever had is between six and eight, but we know that many, most all have been destroyed.
You know, and when they get destroyed, that sort of takes the crews out with them, or at least good portions of the crews.
And we also know that at some point in time, the manpower issue in Ukraine was such that because they didn't have Patriot crew or Patriot batteries available because the Russians destroyed them, these crews were diverted for other tasks, including some going in the infantry.
So again, when we see 17 firing batteries, Ukraine simply don't have people trained up to do this.
So you throw the firing batteries in and it's nothing.
Also, we don't know what kind of patriot they're getting.
One patriot is not like the other patriot.
If they're getting older patriots, they could be systems that haven't been upgraded.
They don't have the more modern missiles.
They're incapable of intercepting the modern Russian ballistic missiles.
We just don't know what's going on.
And what nation is going to do?
For instance, Germany has 12 firing batteries available.
That's it.
Two of those are in Poland, dedicated to a NATO mission in Poland.
Germany's already provided, I think, three batteries to Ukraine, which have been destroyed.
But Germany is one of the nations that Trump's leaning on here.
Are they going to give all 12 up, knowing that they have nothing to defend themselves with, knowing that they've embarked on a process of providing dismantled tourist missiles to Ukraine?
And at some point in time, if Ukraine fires an assembled tourist missile, the Dusseldorf facility where these missiles were made was probably going to be hit by a Rushniks, nothing to defend it, politically suicide.
This is the dumbest thing in the world.
This president truly is the stupidest man in history.
This is purely about political cover his you-know-what.
This is a man who has been embarrassed, humiliated by the fact that Vladimir Putin won't roll over and play dead for him, that he doesn't have a strategy, that he's allowed Keith Kellogg to box him into a corner.
He's allowed the incompetence of Marco Rubio to box him into a corner.
And then he's abandoned Pete Hegseth, who was simply acting on the instructions he was given to go America first and disentangle ourselves from a disastrous policy in Ukraine that's already taken $100 billion plus of our money.
This is what President Trump said he wasn't going to do.
And now he's doing it.
And let me tell you.
Why the abandonment of Hegseth and how can the Central Intelligence Agency have access to equipment that's owned and stored by the Pentagon?
No, there's no U.S. equipment involved here.
They're not dipping into Pentagon stocks.
This is a CIA arrangement.
This is classically what they do.
They're actually pretty stupid talking about it in the open because they're giving away things they shouldn't be giving away.
But the CIA is going to nations that possess a weapon system, and then they're seeking diversion of that weapon system outside of normal American procurement channels, which means that if it's done covertly, you can bypass reporting requirements to Congress or at least limit it to the gang of eight, just get a presidential finding.
This is how we move stuff around the world.
This is what the CIA does, this evil stuff where we send weapons where they shouldn't be, doing things that publicly we couldn't link them to.
But now the CIA, because this president is literally the dumbest man in the world and they have a sycophantic bootlicker as the director of the CIA, who instead of telling us, saying, Mr. President, don't talk about it.
If we're going to do it, don't talk about it.
But the president has to talk about it because it's about stroking his ego.
So now they're going to go to Spain and they're going to divert these Patriot systems to Spain through a European cutout because there won't be any American fingerprints on this.
They're going to pay for all this.
And then what's going to happen is Germany is going to foot the bill to order new Patriot systems that'll backfill the Spanish ones.
So there's no American equipment involved, new production, which again raises the question, is Spain going to give up its five Patriot batteries, just strip them away, and then wait how many years it's going to take to get new ones built and sent out, knowing that Israel has a procurement priority, knowing that the United States itself is seeking to upgrade and expand.
This is stupidity writ large.
I can't express my disdain for the president and for anybody who's advised him that this is a good thing.
Are these missiles the type that can only be operated by Americans because of the national security implications of the codes and satellite readings necessary to guide them?
No, no, no.
There are advanced block versions of the Patriot that we provide to the Middle East.
There's Middle Eastern consumers.
Some of them might be involved in this stupidity that's about to take place.
European consumers, NATO.
If you're NATO, you might have access to a more advanced version that my dog's protesting.
Maverick agrees with what you're saying about Trump.
Maverick's like, he's an idiot.
He's a jerk.
Well, he actually said something else, but thank God we don't translate dog talk perfectly because we'd have to bleep it out.
But the point is, no, you don't need American hands on this.
This is not like attackums or things of that nature.
These are export variant patriots that have been approved for export to foreign nations.
So there are literally no American fingerprints on this at all.
No American money.
This is just the CIA going into cutting.
The CIA is one of the biggest arms dealers in the world, illegal arms dealers in the world.
And again, the stupidity of the president to expose this aspect of the CIA's work the way he's done is stupid.
Here's his goffing buddy from over the weekend, Chris Cut Number Two.
I expect in the coming days, you will see weapons flowing at a record level to help Ukraine defend themselves.
I expect in the coming days that there will be tariffs and sanctions available to President Trump he's never had before.
I expect in the coming days more support from Europe regarding their efforts to help Ukraine.
Putin made a miscalculation here.
For six months, President Trump tried to entice Putin to the table.
The attacks have gone up, not down.
One of the biggest miscalculations Putin has made is to play Trump.
And you just watch, in the coming days and weeks, there's going to be a massive effort to get Putin to the table.
And to those who are helping him, China, buying cheap Russian oil and having no accountability, those days are about over.
What is he talking about?
I have to watch what I'm saying here because this is, if there's anybody who's dumber than President Trump, it's Lindsey Graham.
The ignorance manifests in what he just said.
Lindsay, let me help you out here, you perfumed princess.
You're going to sanction China.
Let me remind you, Lindsay, that in April, the president tried to put big-time tariffs on China.
China cut off America's access to rare earth minerals, including the kind of sophisticated magnetic materials that are essential for automobile production.
The U.S. automobile industry is collapsing as we speak because they don't have access to the materials they need to manufacture cars, so they can't fulfill orders.
So it collapsed.
You know what the president did, Lindsay?
He backed down immediately, immediately.
And they began the lengthy process of renegotiating with the Chinese.
But the Chinese didn't roll over and play dead, Lindsay, because they're in control, not the president.
The president tried to play China and China played him back.
Now, what happened is just recently, they just entered a new deal.
And now the American automobile industry is like, hey, we can get back on track.
We got the magnetic materials.
We're doing good.
And now you're talking about putting 100% tariffs on China, you idiot.
You think China's going to go, oh, God, yeah, right?
Keep flowing the rare earth minerals, guys.
Let's K. We just told the Russians that this is strategic.
We sat down with the Europeans and said defending Russia is the most important thing in the world, but Lindsey Graham wants to put 100% sanctions on us.
We surrender.
You're an idiot, Graham.
China's going to pull the plug on rare earth minerals and the automobile industry's done.
Trump will back down and you're going to look like the fool you are.
That's just that.
Brazil just said, you put tariffs on us.
We'll cut off all trade with America.
Brazil's not blinking.
China's not blinking.
And you really think India is going to sink their economy because of your stupidity?
Why the president listens to this failed individual, this failed human being, I don't understand.
But again, I don't understand anything about this president because he never surrounds himself with experts.
Hey, Donald Trump, call me.
We'll fix it, you idiot.
We can get peace again with Russia and we don't have to destroy American industry in the process.
Stop pretending you're a tough guy.
You're not.
You don't have the cards.
You're carrying a pair of twos against Russia that you know has at least four kings on the table.
You're fabulous, Scott.
Fabulous.
Are the neocons triumphant in this administration?
No, to be triumphant, you have to win.
Well, I mean, they're imagining that they're triumphant in that they have his ear.
The Kelsey Gabberts, the J.D. Vansus, whoever else was there saying, don't do this, don't do this, America first.
They're not saying anything.
But see, I don't know if it's about the success of their ability to argue or just the stupidity of this president.
This is the easiest man in the world to play.
I mean, Donald Trump is just, I mean, man, I wish I had people like him against me all the time because I can play him like a fine-tooth fiddle.
It's all about his ego.
I just have to find the things that he's committed to for an ego-wise, address those, and I own him.
He will do the literally Donald Trump is the living manifestation of why the OODA loop works.
The OODA looping, the decision-making cycle, John Boyd's, how to shoot down airplanes applied to business and warfare.
Get inside the decision-making cycle of your opponent.
You will own them.
The Chinese, the Indians, the Russians, everybody, they're inside Trump's decision-making cycle.
He is reacting to them.
That means that he's never in charge of defining the situation.
He's reactive the entire time.
And all they have to do is continue to play him and he will spin out of control.
And that's the end of the United States.
I mean, we are literally headed down a path towards absolute failure as a nation economically.
Again, I just have to tell you, talk to the U.S. automobile industry how they feel about what Lindsey Graham's proposing in regards to sanctions and what that means for rare earth minerals.
And don't tell me that he's going to get it from Ukraine.
Russia just occupied the second largest lithium or the largest lithium plant or mine in Ukraine.
The rest of the rare earth minerals will go to Russia as well.
That peace deal with Congo just collapsed.
The three non-diplomats they sent ran away for their lives.
And China is getting ready to pull the plug on it again because Lindsey Graham's an idiot.
This president is the most easily played person in the world.
So this isn't about a victory for the neocons.
This is about a defeat for America.
The neocons aren't in charge of anything.
Donald Trump's in charge.
His ego is in charge.
And, you know, and that's the danger because they think they're playing him, but it won't.
Sooner or later, he's going to get embarrassed.
The thing about Donald Trump is that he's predictably unpredictable.
He will commit today.
And listen to the words he said.
He didn't commit to anything up to 17, the tariffs in 50 days.
He doesn't commit to anything because he doesn't know what he's doing.
He doesn't know what he's doing.
The people advising him don't know what they're doing either.
So there's no hard plan here.
There are no 17 batteries ready to go to Ukraine.
That's a guarantee.
That's just a number of a potential number.
There may be a few flowing in the next couple of days, but not as many as he thinks.
And when they get there, they're going to be destroyed.
They're not going to be operable.
They don't have crews.
This is Donald Trump just being typical Trump.
I mean, this is an embarrassment to America and it's a danger to the entire world.
Last week, you described Ukraine as a hospice patient waiting to die.
Can Donald Trump's armaments, can this scheme that you've just described possibly affect or delay that?
No, it's a shot of morphine.
I mean, you know, Zelensky's there crying in pain and he's going to get a little shot of morphine.
He's going to feel good for a moment, but it doesn't change the fact there's cancer inside Ukraine destroying the Ukraine.
And the cancer's name is Zelensky.
The cancer is the Banderist ideology that has captured Ukraine.
The cancer is Europe and the United States that are using Ukraine as a proxy.
It doesn't matter what Ukraine wants anymore.
We're the ones that are driving a policy.
We never even asked the Ukrainians what's good for them, etc.
I mean, Zelensky's saying air defense, air defense, but we're not giving him air defense.
We're not giving him anything.
The Russians have broken the code on violating Ukrainian airspace, and they are flooding the zone with hundreds of drones a night.
There will come a time within a month, they're estimating, that Russia will launch over a thousand drones in a night and be able to sustain that rate indefinitely because they're producing more than a thousand of these geranium drones every day.
Russia's in full manufacturing mode on this, together with Esconder missiles, caliber missiles, the whole thing.
There's nothing we can do to help Ukraine.
So this is just a shot of morphine so that Zelensky can get a nice little warm buzz before the pain returns.
You, well, let me ask you this.
How dangerous is Germany becoming under Chancellor Murs?
The potential's there.
Let me remind people of something.
Back in 1943, there was the Quebec Conference, and that's where Churchill and Roosevelt got together to sort of talk about what the world's going to look like after the defeat of Nazi Germany.
And Churchill came out and said, you know, man, these Germans, they keep coming back.
We had, you know, the World War I is German.
Some people argue that it might be British, but from the British perspective, it was the Germans' fault.
And World War II, Nazi Germany.
Maybe Churchill said we need to strip Germany of all its industry and just make it an agrarian nation.
And Roosevelt went a step further.
He said, no, the problem isn't industry.
The problem is the Germans.
And unless we castrate them all, we're going to continue to have a problem because they're going to continue to reproduce.
And that's what we need to finish.
And so that's where Morgenthau, Henry Morgenthau, the Secretary of Treasury, came in with the Morgenthau plan, which was to break Germany up into small components, deindustrialize it, and then starve them to death, lose 30, 50% of the population and leave a reduced Germany there because that's the only way Europe would ever be safe.
Because if you let Germany beat Germany, Germany does what?
Nationalism, industrialism, militarism combined.
You get the Fourth Reich.
And that's what we have today.
We have the Fourth Reich.
The only good news is that Mertz doesn't have the firm support of the German people.
He could easily come up with a vote of no confidence.
And the intentions of the German government to become a new Fourth Reich aren't matched by the capability, the actual capability.
The German people are not a militarized society.
No matter how much Rhein Metal and the other German industrialists want to do these things, their economy is incapable of the kinds of sustained military industrial production necessary to do this.
And so, you know, they have this dream, this vision that they can't yet implement.
But the problem is that vision is there.
We now have Mertz literally saying that this time we're going to do it right, meaning that we failed the last time.
What did you fail at?
World domination?
Killing the Jews?
Murdering the Russians?
I mean, yeah, you failed at that.
It's a damn good thing you did.
And now what?
He wants to do it again.
Let's the American people wake up.
Pro-hint.
Send five divisions of American forces now, occupy Berlin and eliminate the German government.
It'll be easy to do right now.
If you don't, we're going to have to do it 20 years from now when the Fourth Reich is there and these people who are pretending to be our friends suddenly become something else.
Sweden announced this morning it's considering raising the draft age from 47.
I had no idea it was there to 70.
What's going on?
Stupidity.
I mean, stupidity.
Look, Judge, I was a Marine.
Now, I like to consider myself to be in relatively good shape, but I'm turning 64 tomorrow.
And as you know, when we hit a certain happy birthday, lad.
Well, thanks.
When we hit a certain age threshold, it doesn't matter what the brain's thinking or the heart's thinking.
The body's saying something completely different.
I will tell you that as much as I stayed in shape, when I hit 36 years old in the Marine Corps, you know, running the three miles, I wasn't running three six minute miles anymore.
I wasn't doing sustained calisthenics the way I was.
The body just stops functioning and it starts to hurt.
The knees hurt, the back hurts, the whole thing.
And that's if you stay in shape the full time.
To expect anybody over the age of 40, to be honest, to go out in combat, modern combat with the loads necessary to carry, just the performance, no sleep, et cetera, is unrealistic.
So if you're drafting 47-year-olds, you already lost the war.
And a 70-year-old, it's a game set match.
Look, the Germans did it.
It was called the Volkssturm.
And there's a movie, a well-known movie, Downfall, that's based upon reality.
And there's a scene where the Berlin garrison commanders out there with the professional German troops, and the Volkssturm shows up.
And he has to go to Himmler and say, get them out of here.
They're not helping.
In fact, if you bring in these untrained young boys and old men, you actually make it worse for us because we can't have an effective battle plan with them.
They're always going to lose and we're always going to have to go and rescue them.
Get them out of here.
You know, Sweden, recruit all the 70-year-olds you want.
It'll hasten your defeat and that'll be a good thing for you.
In fact, I encourage all of NATO to raise their draft age to 70 and begin recruiting all the old people you can because that'll be the surest sign that NATO is just a lunatic organization.
I don't usually get into domestic American politics, but here's a very interesting statement from Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, who attempted to refer, to attempted to amend statutes to refer to Israel as nuclear armed Israel.
And of course, they won't even allow a vote on that.
Here's her lament, cut number 11.
I'm entering amendments to strike $500 million more dollars for nuclear armed Israel.
And it's important to say nuclear armed Israel because they do have nuclear weapons.
This is not a helpless country.
And we already give them $3.4 billion every single year in the state from the State Department.
$3.4 billion every single year.
They don't need another $500 million in our defense budget.
That's for the American people's defense.
That's for the defense of the United States of America and our borders.
And, you know, Israel, you can, nuclear-armed Israel, I think it's really important to phrase it that way.
Nuclear-armed Israel doesn't need $500 more million dollars from the American people.
Our government just bombed Iran on their behalf and destroyed their nuclear, Iran's nuclear problem.
So I'm entering an amendment to strike $500 million more dollars for nuclear-armed Israel.
I'll never let that phrase in there.
What do you think Nets and Yahoo was talking to Trump about last week in their three private meetings in two days?
Well, what they weren't talking about is Israel's nuclear program.
I mean, God bless Marjorie Taylor Green.
You know, I can't say that I always had the highest opinion of her, primarily because of the imagery, the image that's put out by the media, how they treat her.
But I had the honor and privilege of meeting her last fall when I was in Washington, D.C., going around and trying to get lobbying people to try and stop a nuclear war with Russia to oppose Biden's approval of long-range attack him.
She is intelligent, articulate, and kind-hearted.
That's what I took from the walk away from her.
I was just so shocked.
I went, this is not what I expected at all.
And so to see her doing what she's doing right now, the amount of courage it takes for her to do that, she deserves a heck of a lot more support than she's getting from the American people.
The American people need to understand that how the media portrays this woman is not at all accurate.
And she's the only one that has the courage to come up and do this.
But it's not going to happen.
The United States has a long-standing policy that dates back to the Nixon administration of deliberate ambiguity, where we won't acknowledge Israel's nuclear program.
They won't acknowledge it either.
It's there.
Nobody talks about it.
And she's not going to be able to overcome that.
That's just not going to happen.
What did Trump and Netanyahu talk about?
First of all, they talked about Netanyahu.
I need to remind people that before Netanyahu came here, Trump had to put out several amazingly disturbing social media platform postings that said, you know, the court, Israeli courts can't go after Bibi, that the United States will sanction Israel if they go after Bibi.
Bebe's a wonderful man.
He's doing everything great and wonderful and right.
Since when does the president of the United States intercede in the judiciary of a foreign nation about the enforcement of their Own laws.
Benjamin Netanyahu is a corrupt individual.
He and his wife have been charged with very serious corruption charges.
And everybody agrees that if he weren't prime minister, he'd go on trial and he'd probably lose because it's an open and shut case.
That's what they talked about: the continued support of the United States putting pressure on the state of Israel to prevent the prosecution of Benjamin Netanyahu.
That's the one thing they talked about.
The other thing they talked about is Iran and how to go forward on Iran, what's the best way to go forward.
I think the president and Netanyahu have agreed that there will be additional strikes against Iran because Iran will not yield on its nuclear front.
But they did talk about, I believe, potential off-ramps if Russia could be involved.
But then the president's going to just destroy any potential of Russian intervention through his stupidity in Ukraine.
And then lastly, they talked about Gaza and they talked about how to implement the president's vision on Gaza.
And I believe these are the things that they talked about.
Wow.
Thank you, Scotty.
Thanks for your candid comments about Congresswoman Green and for your incredible analysis.
Deeply appreciated, my dear friend.
And thanks for accommodating my schedule by coming on today.
Oh, thanks.
And safe trips for you.
Oh, thank you, Scott.
We'll talk to you soon.
Okay, thanks.
So even though we do have one more segment for you today, which is Ryan Dawson on the Epstein files at four o'clock, I will let you know who we're doing tomorrow.
I will be traveling, so Chris will be posting some things from time to time while I'm gone.
You might see us pop up if there's major breaking headlines on our end of the world.
But tomorrow, Tuesday, Ambassador Charles Freeman at 8 o'clock, Professor Gilbert Doctorow at 10.
Aaron Mate at 11.
Professor Glenn Diesen at 1.
Professor John Mearsheimer at 3.
And we will find him, Max Blumenthal, at 4.
But Ryan Dawson at 4 o'clock today, what does he know about Epstein?
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