July 14, 2025 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
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| Hi, everyone. | |
| Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. | |
| Today is Tuesday, July 15th, 2025. | |
| Max Blumenthal joins us from the Capitol of the United States, from inside the Capitol building. | |
| Max, always a pleasure, my dear friend. | |
| I must ask you what you are doing there inside the Capitol. | |
| Well, there was a new media meeting of the Republican Study Conference, which comprises like 70 members of Congress. | |
| And they basically were interfacing them with conservative incorporated con Inc. | |
| influencers from various conservative outlets and trying to get publicity, especially for the younger members. | |
| And so I just kind of wandered in after hearing about it, learning where it was. | |
| And I was able to ask numerous members of Congress about why the Republicans just shut down a bill calling to release the Epstein files. | |
| They shut it down in the rules committee. | |
| I got some pretty hilarious responses. | |
| And then at the end, the Hebrew hammer, Randy Fine, the biggest supporter of genocide in Congress, walked in and I asked him about quickly, I was able to ask him before he, I was like basically restrained by his staff. | |
| I asked him how he thought he would fare in the Gaza Strip under the starvation conditions that he supports. | |
| And he didn't really want to answer that question. | |
| I'm not surprised he didn't want to answer it. | |
| I don't know what answer he could possibly have given. | |
| Was there some impetus in the Republican caucus or the 70 Republicans that were there with you to release the files? | |
| I asked that because the following occurred. | |
| You might not be aware of this, but the president in one of his offhanded comments apparently said, oh, there's more she can release, referring to Bondi. | |
| She wasn't there when he said it, but she had her press person respond and say she stands firm. | |
| Nothing else is coming out. | |
| And then Mike Johnson, the speaker, I don't know if he was there with you, said, we're breaking with the president on this. | |
| The Republican caucus wants the files out. | |
| Now, I don't know what's going to happen if they subpoena those files from her and the single house has subpoena authority. | |
| She'll have no choice. | |
| You'll have to go to a judge to get the subpoena cost. | |
| That would be quite a sight. | |
| It would be. | |
| And most of the members of Congress, Republicans I spoke to here, who all would identify as America First and Trump supporters said they just trust the president. | |
| They simply trust him. | |
| There were a few, Representative Burleson, who wants to break with the president, who says this isn't going away. | |
| Representative Burchett said that the problem with the bill, which Representative Roe Conna, the Democrat from California, introduced in committee was that it wouldn't pass muster. | |
| It was not a legitimate bill and that he wants a better bill. | |
| So basically, they don't want to deal with it on a technicality. | |
| But for the most part, they all seem to want this to go away. | |
| Another member of Congress I didn't recognize said we need to focus on issues that are important to Main Street. | |
| And it's not going to go away because Epstein is symbolic of this kind of bipartisan, decadent elite that may have ties to foreign intelligence for so many in the America first base. | |
| And they're just not going to accept an explanation from Trump, who had such a long and deep relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, that this should just go away and that they should just trust him. | |
| I think the trust has been broken. | |
| Epstein has shattered the Trump mystique. | |
| And so, yeah, some people might dismiss this as a kind of boutique conspiracy theory, but I understand the power it has within Trump's base, which is specifically why I wanted to talk to these legislators who are lining up behind Trump. | |
| I also got to speak to Matt Schlapp, who runs CPAC, which other than DPUSA, I mean, CPAC is like the foremost con inc conference and organization. | |
| And he quickly said, you know, we trust the president. | |
| And, you know, while we need to protect our young people, we need to stand with the president. | |
| So this is pathetic. | |
| Dinesh D'Souza just said that he wants to shut down discussion of the Epstein files. | |
| Charlie Kirk yesterday said he's done talking about it and he trusts the president. | |
| If you watch that file, I don't know if that video, I don't know if Chris can bring it up. | |
| You can actually see Charlie Kirk looking down at his computer repeatedly as though he's reading a memo that came from on high. | |
| Wow. | |
| I mean, does the Epstein imbroglio, does the Epstein scandal, does the involvement of Epstein with Israeli intelligence and certainly present and former American office holders have the potential for interfering with the United States relationship with Israel? | |
| Well, we can see that it has already led to an escalation in Israeli interference and meddling in American politics. | |
| Tucker Carlson at TPUSA declared matter-of-factly that Jeffrey Epstein was an Israeli intelligence asset of some variety. | |
| Now, we know that Jeffrey Epstein had relationships, close relationships with former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak. | |
| He knew former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. | |
| He knew former Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Perez. | |
| And he arranged a meeting for Benjamin Netanyahu with JPMorgan executives on behalf of JPMorgan, it appears. | |
| But I don't know if he was a Mossad agent. | |
| He traveled to Israel in 2008 when he was fearing prosecution in the United States. | |
| There are all these ties, and he's applied for multiple passports to travel to Israel as well as Africa. | |
| So Tucker Carlson brings this up. | |
| A large part of the TPUSA conference clearly was with him and was excited that he was bringing this up. | |
| And this frightened Netanyahu, not just Netanyahu, but the Israeli military intelligence apparatus, the Israeli foreign ministry. | |
| And we saw Tucker Carlson threatened by former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, who comes out of the Likud party, and tell Tucker Carlson on Twitter X that we will not stand for this and we are going to fight back. | |
| Basically, and declaring that as prime minister, he interfaced directly with the Mossad and would have known if Epstein was a Mossad agent and he was not a Mossad agent. | |
| He is very specific language. | |
| But he essentially threatened Tucker Carlson, one of Trump's closest allies. | |
| Then someone lesser known named Amichai Chikli, who is the head of diaspora affairs for Israel, who is one of Israel's top agents in the United States, told Tucker Carlson to basically shut up and told Tucker Carlson to shut it down. | |
| This is a foreign official operating in the United States telling an American commentator who's close to the president to shut up. | |
| And Amikai Chikli has violated the foreign agent registration, has worked to circumvent the Department of Justice's Foreign Agent Registration Act by working through American NGOs to channel Israeli money into propaganda operations in the U.S. So this is very serious. | |
| Israel is interfering in the U.S. political discourse and political system in a way that it hasn't before. | |
| And it's all coming out through this Epstein imbroglio. | |
| Well, then Netanyahu and company must fear the revelation of the Epstein files. | |
| They must be terrified that something in there will disrupt their dominance of the government. | |
| I think that could be the case. | |
| It could also just be much more mundane than that, that Donald Trump has a very long-standing deep relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. | |
| It could be embarrassing to him for more information to come out, and he wants this to simply go away. | |
| According to the reporter Michael Wolf, who may or not be very trustworthy, he's seen Polaroid pictures of Donald Trump with topless girls at Jeffrey Epstein's pool, and these photos were taken from Jeffrey Epstein's safe after his death by the FBI, never to appear again. | |
| Steve Bannon, former Trump chief of staff, still an ally of Trump, had a close relationship with Jeffrey Epstein and recorded 16 hours of interviews with Epstein and has never released them. | |
| He teased a film about Epstein back in 2021. | |
| The film never came out. | |
| So, and Steve Bannon has promised some film next year when he was asked about this at the TPUSA conference. | |
| So it may be much more mundane than some deep intelligence infiltration, just be about elites being afraid of embarrassment. | |
| But there's more to know, and they're definitely determined to prevent the public from knowing anything else that we could learn about this. | |
| And therefore, it will persist along with any conspiracy theories or conspiracy facts. | |
| And I should tell you, I have like all these staffers who seem to be circling around me since my interaction with Randy Fiennes. | |
| Hopefully we can finish this interview. | |
| We challenge them to lay a hand on you for God's sake. | |
| What are they going to do? | |
| Suppress your free speech from the capital of the United States? | |
| CNN reports Attorney General Bondi says there's no, quote, no change to her position on Epstein after Trump suggests she could release more files. | |
| Again, I don't know if Trump was just feeling the heat and threw that out as one of his thoughtless, frequent thoughtless phrases, or if he wants her to do it. | |
| Let's move on. | |
| Do you think Iran will just sit back while Netanyahu plot and wait for Netanyahu to plot and execute his next attack? | |
| I don't know what else Iran can do. | |
| I can tell you that many in Iran who I know were disappointed and upset that the Iranian retaliation was limited to 12 days. | |
| And they believed that the reformist government had working through diplomatic channels in Doha and talking to the Trump administration, had wanted to keep a line open to Washington and that they're just determined to always keep an open door for negotiations over the nuclear issue with the U.S., even as their nuclear weapons were being attacked. | |
| And this is seen as a mistake by many who wanted to restore their deterrence and saw that Israel was getting hit in a way that it hadn't before, that it was suffering. | |
| And they've also opened themselves up by failing to restore deterrence for more Israeli sabotage attacks. | |
| And there have been rumors about Israeli assassinations circulating. | |
| I don't think they were true. | |
| But Iran is like on edge right now, on guard for Mossad infiltration. | |
| We saw tens of thousands of Afghan workers in Iran be deported because some of those who were Mossad assets who carried out sabotage attacks during this war had come in from Afghanistan. | |
| So, this is about Iranian deterrence. | |
| They scored a psychological and political blow against Israel, but by ending the war at 12 days, deterrence was not fully established. | |
| However, internally, I should say, internally, and this is something that even like the neocons and the opponents of Iran's government are acknowledging, Iran is stronger than ever before politically. | |
| The Iranian public has become very nationalistic. | |
| We're hearing the public singing of songs that predated the Islamic Republic that go back to the 1940s, like Aye Iran. | |
| There's a surge of nationalism in Iran, which is a form of deterrence in its own way, because Israel's war was ultimately aimed at regime change. | |
| It wasn't about the nuclear weapons. | |
| Right. | |
| Does the West, do people in Iran know the full extent of the damage the Israel, which the Netanyahu regime has done its best to hide? | |
| Well, we just learned that Iran damaged a communications radar, a communications dome at the Aludaid air base in Qantar, which is a U.S. airbase, sort of the head of the snake, where so many attacks on Iran and throughout the region have been launched. | |
| It's a drone base. | |
| It's a major shipping point for U.S. weapons to the Nevatim air base in Israel, which were then used in the Gaza genocide. | |
| So we were told that all those missiles have been intercepted, but satellite imagery shows that dome is completely missing, and there's a major indentation in the ground there. | |
| So this is something new that we're learning that will be ominous to the Gulf allies of the United States as they are pushed to grow closer and closer to Israel through the Abraham Accords. | |
| Iranians knew as much as we knew in the United States about the damage that Israel was suffering. | |
| And there's more to learn because Israel had such a strict censorship policy and was punishing so many of its own citizens who would publish footage of the ballistic missiles hitting. | |
| So this is why Iranians were so proud of their response after being caught on the back foot and why we're seeing this surge of nationalism in Iran, which has united the country, including opponents of the government, united them in support of just keeping the country from being balkanized and destroyed as Syria was. | |
| Right. | |
| Switching gears, Trump made a bizarre, what else is new, statement yesterday about the mechanism for continued U.S. military aid to Kyiv, that the CIA, from some source unknown, | |
| not the Defense Department, was going to acquire weaponry and sell it to NATO, which would then get it in the hands of the Kyiv regime. | |
| Why do you think Trump has determined either to extend or to give the impression to his neocon buddies that he's extending the special military operation in Ukraine? | |
| Well, the Financial Times just reported that Trump had asked Zelensky, can you hit Moscow if we give you the means to do so? | |
| And Zelensky and the Ukrainian government have been lobbying Trump for Tomahawk missiles, which have a 1600 kilometer range. | |
| So if this report is true, it's a complete, it's another flamboyant betrayal of Donald Trump's base, to whom he promised that he would be a peace president. | |
| He said he could end the war in 24 hours. | |
| Of course, that wasn't going to be the case. | |
| But now, you know, when I ask these Republican legislators who line up behind Trump, is he betraying his base? | |
| They say, actually, well, he's just a deal maker. | |
| And that if he can actually exact a price on Russia by hitting it in Moscow and St. Petersburg, as this Financial Times article reported that Trump was seeking to do, that maybe Russia will come to the table. | |
| Trump complained that he had a discussion with Vladimir Putin, the Russian leader, and that it was quote unquote bad. | |
| And so Trump is trying to do what he did to Iran, where he threatened Iran over negotiations if they failed to make a deal amenable to Donald Trump over its nuclear program. | |
| He would attack them. | |
| He's now threatening Putin in the same way. | |
| And I don't think that the Russian leadership or the Russian population is going to submit to these kind of threats. | |
| And they have substantial deterrent capacity. | |
| And the problem for Trump is they are winning. | |
| As mainstream media acknowledges, they are winning in Ukraine. | |
| They just took a lithium field that Zelensky had offered Donald Trump as part of the mineral negotiations. | |
| Wow. | |
| Are the neocons triumphant in the Trump White House, or is he just giving them that impression to curry favor with people like Lindsey Graham? | |
| They won on Iran. | |
| They completely won and overwhelmed a much weaker force, the restrainers. | |
| And they're clearly winning in every way within the Trump administration. | |
| On virtually any promise he made to make peace, he has backpedaled. | |
| And it's not just in his administration, but in Congress. | |
| The Tom Cotton faction is doing, and the Lindsey Graham faction, they're doing very well under the Trump administration. | |
| Trump has been rolled just like he was in his first term by the neocons. | |
| I get it why he's rolled by Netanyahu and the Mossad agents and assets who get into his head. | |
| I get that. | |
| I get the influence of the donor class. | |
| I don't get how this same mentality has gotten To him on Ukraine. | |
| That I don't understand. | |
| Do you have an explanation for how Lindsey Graham and Tom Cotton turned Donald Trump around on Ukraine? | |
| Well, Donald Trump is not exactly a deep thinker. | |
| He thought that he could come in without suspending weapons to Ukraine and end the war. | |
| And that hasn't happened. | |
| And it hasn't happened for one main reason, which I said before. | |
| Russia is winning. | |
| And if Russia is winning, why would Vladimir Putin stop his offensive and stop achieving gains on the ground, which will deliver him a favorable position at the negotiating table and allow Zelensky to rearm and allow the Europeans to rearm Zelensky? | |
| What is Russia hitting right now with its drone attacks on Kiev and other core cities and missile attacks? | |
| It's hitting recruitment centers. | |
| And we're actually seeing Ukrainian young men in some cases celebrate these attacks because they just don't want to go to the front and die. | |
| But it's hitting the recruitment centers because it does not want to allow Ukraine to mobilize. | |
| And what Trump wants to do is have a pause, have both sides sit down while Zelensky remobilizes. | |
| And then Putin probably has to go back to war in the end because who can trust the United States as an honest broker, especially after what we just witnessed in Iran? | |
| So the real reason is that Putin does not have any reason to stop this fight. | |
| And Ukraine can consistently count on the U.S. and the Europeans to keep the weapons flowing no matter what. | |
| And so Donald Trump has failed on another diplomatic front where he promised immediate success. | |
| Max, I'll let you get out of there. | |
| God only knows who's staring at you while you're talking to us, but thank you very much. | |
| There's Representative. | |
| Can you see him now? | |
| He's just there. | |
| Representative Tim Burcham is riding the skateboard that he's about to give to Tulsi Gabbard in the hallway. | |
| Wow. | |
| And what else is going on? | |
| Yeah. | |
| Unbelievable. | |
| You have such courage. | |
| I would imagine you were not welcome there, but God bless you for exposing them to the rest of us. | |
| Thank you, my friend. | |
| All the best to you. | |
| I'll be away for a little bit. | |
| We'll see you at the end of the month. | |
| Thanks a lot, Judge. | |
| Thank you. | |
| Wow. | |
| Very, very, very courageous. | |
| We are taking some time off. | |
| Chris will be posting videos, of course, of work that we have done and maybe some things that you haven't seen. | |
| If you want to OD on judging freedom, there are close to 4,000 videos posted at JudgeNap. | |
| You know how to find them. | |
| We wish you the best. | |
| If there is breaking news, as there was the last time I took this kind of time off, you will see us here. | |
| Short of that, we'll be back on Monday, July 28th. | |
| God bless you. | |
| All the best. |
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