July 15, 2025 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
23:21
| 
| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| Hi, everyone. | |
| Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. | |
| Today is Tuesday, July 15th, 2025. | |
| Aaron Mate joins us now. | |
| Aaron, a pleasure, my dear friend. | |
| I want to spend some time chatting with you about Benjamin Nets and Yahoo, Jeffrey Epstein, and Mossad. | |
| But before we do, this is a rather odd announcement that President Trump issued yesterday in his own terminology. | |
| But basically, the CIA is going to gather military equipment from some source and sell it to European countries who are going to sell it to Kyiv. | |
| Military equipment probably insufficient to defend Kyiv anyway. | |
| What do you make of this? | |
| This really is Donald Trump's war now, isn't it? | |
| Of course it is. | |
| And the funny thing is he keeps saying it's Biden's war. | |
| Yes, he said it as recently as yesterday. | |
| But look, who are the most enthusiastic champions of the proxy war? | |
| It's not even Democrats anymore. | |
| It's people like Lindsey Graham, who's one of Trump's top allies, who on Sunday, shortly before Trump made his announcement of his new Ukraine policy, Lindsey Graham said, we're about to see a turning point in the war. | |
| The game is about to change. | |
| And he talked about two main things. | |
| One, an increased flow of weapons from the U.S. and new sanctions, a new threat of sanctions from Trump, which he lodged on Monday, saying to Russia that unless you make peace within 50 days, we're going to pose secondary sanctions. | |
| So going after countries like China, which do trade with Russia, which would be a disaster. | |
| And I do not think Trump will follow through on. | |
| As for the weapons, the new scheme is that NATO will pay for the weapons and the U.S. will provide them. | |
| First of all, how much money can all these European states really pony up? | |
| They're in dire financial straits. | |
| They've already spent a lot of money themselves on this proxy war. | |
| So the idea that all of a sudden NATO will make up for the shortfall that Ukraine is already experiencing, I don't buy it. | |
| Especially if Trump is not going to go before Congress to ask for more funding, which I don't think he will. | |
| That's what I've heard from my sources close to the White House. | |
| I don't expect he'll do that. | |
| That would be a huge betrayal of one of his key campaign promises. | |
| So to me, a lot of this is all talk. | |
| And now today there's a report of the Financial Times saying that on a July 4th call, Trump asked Zelensky, you know, if he can hit Moscow with the missiles he has. | |
| And Lensky said, well, we'll do that if you can give us more. | |
| But the only weapons that could really do that are tomahawks, which Trump is not going to provide because those are nuclear capable. | |
| And that's why they were even a red line for Biden. | |
| And then you have the ATACMs, but Ukraine already has the ATACMs. | |
| And that was supposed to be a game changer too, but it wasn't because Russia, as people like Anthony Blinken and Barack Obama and other proxy warriors have long recognized, Russia has the advantage militarily. | |
| So what Trump is doing now is, I think, trying to save face because he won't take the steps that really would be required to sit down face to face with Vladimir Putin, reach an agreement that addresses what Russia calls the root causes of this war, which aren't just the conflict and the Donbass that preceded the Russian invasion, but also NATO encroachment, which Trump doesn't want to do. | |
| So therefore, his next best option in his eyes is to talk tough and try to appease Lindsey Graham. | |
| I think that Trump views the war the way he views many of these things as a real estate transaction. | |
| He certainly appears to view Gaza as that. | |
| I don't want to peer into Gaza yet, but I really believe he doesn't understand the Russian mentality, the Russian determination, or the Russian history. | |
| However, here is Senator Graham with what you mentioned he said on Sunday. | |
| Here he is on Sunday. | |
| 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. | |
| I don't think he knows what he's talking about with respect to the determination of Beijing to thumb its nose at Trump's tariffs. | |
| And especially we've seen the struggles that Trump has had imposing these tariffs. | |
| Now Trump is going to open up even, he's going to escalate further his already faltering trade war with China. | |
| I just don't see it. | |
| And Lindsey Graham and Trump just fundamentally don't under fundamentally don't understand or refuse to understand the Russian mentality here. | |
| Russia went to war in 2022 after years of the failed Minsk peace process, where the U.S. used its leverage in Ukraine to encourage Kyiv to ignore its requirements under Mitsk, which came down to basically respecting the rights of ethnic Russians in eastern Donbass, and used that period to build up Ukraine's military and further integrate Ukraine into NATO. | |
| Russia tried to address those concerns before it invaded. | |
| Biden wouldn't even discuss them. | |
| Okay, so they got an invasion. | |
| At this point now, Russia's invested a lot in this war. | |
| Now, you could criticize Russia if you want for maybe being too maximalist in its demands right now. | |
| But to say that Putin has played Trump as Graham did there, that's false because Putin's been very clear what his demands are. | |
| They are maximalist. | |
| Now they want recognition of all the regions in Ukraine that they've laid claim to, which, by the way, they only laid claim to after Ukraine walked away from the peace deal that was negotiated three years ago now in Istanbul under, again, U.S. pressure. | |
| So you can criticize maybe Putin now for being inflexible, okay, but you can't say he's played Trump because they've been very, very clear on their demands. | |
| And that includes not just addressing, you know, the internal situation in Ukraine, where you have millions of ethnic Russians who were denied their rights after the 2014 coup that overthrew the leader they voted for, Yanukovych, but also the steady expansion of NATO and military infrastructure on Russia's borders. | |
| Trump so far has shown no willingness to address that. | |
| And that's why you have a war still going on. | |
| If anybody's playing Trump, it's Graham and his colleagues. | |
| Do you think that the neocons are not triumphant in Trump's administration? | |
| They're absolutely running the show right now. | |
| We saw that with that brief pause on weapons to Ukraine. | |
| So Pete Hegseth, Eldridge Colby and others, they determined, for whatever reason, that the U.S. was running low on critical weapons and they needed to slow them down to Ukraine. | |
| I strongly doubt Trump didn't know about this. | |
| But after a little bit of outcry from neocons and their media allies, Trump caved immediately and claimed he didn't know anything about it. | |
| So that's just an example, an illustration of Trump's being so brittle, as he has been since his first term in the face of pressure from the war lobby. | |
| He talks a good game. | |
| You know, it's funny. | |
| What he says about Putin is like, Putin talks a good game. | |
| He talks about peace, but then he goes and continues the war. | |
| Well, that applies to Trump. | |
| Trump talks a good game. | |
| He talks about making peace. | |
| But the moment he faces any kind of pushback from the war lobby, the permanent war lobby, he crumbles. | |
| Here's what he said yesterday, the essence of which is, quote, I know what Pete was doing, meaning Hegseth. | |
| However, it's couched in such Trumpian language, it's hard to figure out what he's saying. | |
| Chris, cut number 14. | |
| Is there any concern about the U.S. stockpiles? | |
| There was a pause in delivery of weaponry to Ukraine in order to evaluate, apparently, the U.S. stockpiles. | |
| What came out of that? | |
| Evaluation. | |
| I mean, this was a very big, what we're talking about today is a very, very big day. | |
| And what Pete was doing, and me too, I knew what Pete was doing, was evaluation because we knew this was going to happen. | |
| And now we actually announced it. | |
| They voted on it. | |
| It's all been done. | |
| So obviously that has a big impact on, you know, when you say pause, obviously you're not going to be doing things if you don't know what's going to happen here. | |
| But we were pretty sure this was going to happen. | |
| So we did a little bit of a pause. | |
| Who voted on it? | |
| What is he talking about? | |
| He's just trying to save face for going back on the pause that was done under his watch that his defense secretary ordered. | |
| And then after a little bit of outcry from the media, he pretended not to know about it. | |
| And now that he's going to be ferrying new weapons to Ukraine, now he wants to make it look as if this was his plan all along. | |
| Just a brief pause so they can figure out what they have. | |
| And then now they announce the weapons to Ukraine. | |
| This announcement of new weapons to Ukraine, which again is being supposedly going to be paid for by NATO states, not by the U.S., this is just to appease the war lobby, which freaked out about that pause on weapons that Pete Hagseth oversaw and has been alarmed at Trump's talk of making a deal with Russia. | |
| And because Trump obviously, he doesn't seem to have any coherent principles, he just goes with the wind. | |
| And right now, it's neocons, the war lobby in Washington, who still have his ear most forcefully. | |
| Switching to a different topic, was Jeffrey Epstein an agent or an asset of Israeli intelligence, the Mossad? | |
| I have no idea, Judge, but the question is fair given all the mysteries surrounding Jeffrey Epstein and the lengths that people at high levels have gone to conceal basic facts from the public. | |
| But it's hard to say. | |
| It's not an issue that I've looked into deeply, so I don't know. | |
| But what I do know is that right now Trump and his allies are facing a serious backlash for a good reason, given that so many of them, including Dan Bongino, hyped up this idea of a massive conspiracy and cover-up involving Epstein and a blackmail ring among elites. | |
| And they promised their voters accountability. | |
| They promised transparency. | |
| And what are they doing now? | |
| They're going back on that. | |
| Now, there could be a few reasons for that. | |
| One is because there is something really damning here and Trump is implicated in it himself. | |
| And that's very plausible, given that Trump, for a time, was very tight with Jeffrey Epstein. | |
| Or really, all this has just been hype. | |
| And it's been hyped up to give MAGA leaders an excuse to make it appear as if they're doing something for the people while really doing nothing, while their actual policies, for example, cut things like Medicaid and hurt some of the MAGA base that put them in power. | |
| So I don't know. | |
| But certainly there's a lot of questions. | |
| Other people have looked into this closer than I have. | |
| There's the close Epstein associate, Maxwell, whose father did work with Israel. | |
| There are certainly questions that deserve transparency. | |
| And no matter what the truth is, I appreciate the fact that this controversy, whatever the facts are, is bringing you scrutiny on Israel. | |
| Because whether or not Epstein was a Mossad intelligence agent, it's absolutely clear that Israel has outsized influence on U.S. politics over Congress. | |
| And so whether that's achieved through blackmail or just through normal bribery, the point is this country, this tiny ethno-state that's now committing genocide, is sacrosanct in Washington. | |
| And that needs to be challenged. | |
| So I welcome any controversy that will bring scrutiny on Israel. | |
| I just don't know if the facts support Epstein being a Mossad agent. | |
| You mentioned the implications of Epstein in American domestic policy. | |
| Chris has put together a montage of this. | |
| Watch this. | |
| Cut number nine. | |
| How is it that my father can be convicted of 34 crimes, but no one on Epstein's list has even been brought to light? | |
| How is I'm trying to figure out how that's possible, right? | |
| It's almost like they're trying to protect those pedophiles for some reason. | |
| I can't imagine why, right? | |
| Why is the FBI protecting the greatest pederist, the largest scale pederist in human history? | |
| Simple, because of who's on that list. | |
| Everybody in politics has a vice that's much worse than alcoholism, is the way that I put it. | |
| But we release the list. | |
| Seriously, we need to release the Epstein list. | |
| That is an important thing. | |
| The DOJ may be releasing the list of Jeffrey Epstein's clients. | |
| Will that really happen? | |
| It's sitting on my desk right now to review. | |
| That's been a directive by President Trump. | |
| In this case, in Epstein's case, it is incredibly disturbing. | |
| We have flight logs. | |
| We have information, names that will come out. | |
| I'm not ever going to let this story go because of what I heard from a source about Bill Clinton on a plane with Jeffrey Epstein. | |
| I'm not letting it go ever. | |
| Ever. | |
| Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein? | |
| This guy's been talked about for years. | |
| You're asking, we have Texas, we have this, we have all of the things. | |
| And are people still talking about this guy, this creep? | |
| That is unbelievable. | |
| The latter part happened while the last clip. | |
| Benjamin Netanyahu was here. | |
| That's when the announcement was made. | |
| Never mind what the Attorney General said that it was on her desk. | |
| There never was a list. | |
| Any connection there? | |
| Netanyahu have an interest in being here while it's announced that there is no list and nobody has anything to worry about. | |
| There's no new information coming out on Epstein, notwithstanding what the Attorney General told Fox? | |
| Judge, you know, I'm just speculating here. | |
| And again, I admit it's not something I've looked into deeply, but what I suspect is going on is I do think, as we saw from those clips, the MAGA leadership used this as a campaign strategy, basically, to hype up this idea of a big cover-up conspiracy that Donald Trump was going to expose once he got into office. | |
| The same way that Democrats use RussiaGate, the idea of a sprawling conspiracy between Trump and Russia that Robert Mueller was going to expose. | |
| Don't worry, just keep watching MSNBC and CNN every day, and it's all going to come out. | |
| That's what I think is going on here. | |
| This idea, like, I think if you have a conspiracy now involving Israel and blackmail, first of all, I don't think you need blackmail to get politicians to fall in line in Israel. | |
| They're bought off. | |
| And we saw that with the primaries when APAC spent, you know, over $20 million just to defeat Corey Bush and Jamal Bowman, two Democratic members of Congress. | |
| That's my guess. | |
| That's my guess. | |
| I don't think if I were to bet, I don't think it's on Israel secretly blackmailing all these people via Jeffrey Epstein. | |
| What I suspect is going on with Jeffrey Epstein and people like Trump is, you know, in the same way that that Access Hollywood tape came out and showed Trump to be bragging about being a sexual predator, I wouldn't be surprised if Jeffrey Epstein has some of that stuff on tape. | |
| I mean, they hung out many years ago. | |
| There's footage of them with young women and talking about them. | |
| So to the extent that there's a cover-up here, I suspect it's with, you know, just typical, you know, scummy behavior. | |
| But in terms of an elite pedophile ring and blackmail and Israel involvement, my guess is that that's overblown. | |
| Did Trump's bombing of Iran make the Middle East more stable or more volatile? | |
| Well, of course it made it more volatile. | |
| And now the question is, what is Iran going to do after seeing Trump use the cover of diplomacy to advance his aggression, to advance U.S.-Israeli aggression? | |
| On the eve of new talks with the U.S. and Iran, Israel bombed with Trump's support, and then Trump joined in. | |
| But we know from all the available reporting that Iran retained its enriched uranium. | |
| And so the question is, what is Iran going to do now? | |
| Being told by Trump and Israel that diplomacy is completely useless. | |
| I still see that some Iranian leaders, like the president, are still hoping that diplomacy prevails. | |
| But the overwhelming message from the U.S., and this is not just on the issue of Iran, but on every single issue, I mean, Russia as well as we're talking about, is that negotiations with the U.S. are useless. | |
| They don't get anywhere. | |
| We just don't make agreements with people, with countries that we perceive as our main adversaries. | |
| The only way we look at these foreign governments that deter U.S.-Israeli hegemony is that they have to be eliminated. | |
| That's what Israel's been doing for a long time now, you know, going after Hezbollah, going after Syria, bragging about regime change in Syria, previously Libya, Iraq. | |
| I mean, this is the way the U.S. does business. | |
| And what message Iran will take from that, policy-wise, in terms of what they decide to do is anyone's guess. | |
| But the message that we sent is that diplomacy is completely useless. | |
| Are there negotiations going on that can be reliable to end the bloodshed in Gaza? | |
| Or will Netanyahu never end the bloodshed in Gaza for fear that his government will collapse? | |
| I don't think Netanyahu's main fear is the collapse of his government. | |
| I think he has a goal, which is basically to expel as many Palestinians as possible. | |
| And to do that, they have to continue pushing Palestinians into concentration camps that have been set up. | |
| And they have to keep destroying Gaza's infrastructure and using these fake aid schemes backed by the U.S. and Israel to kill more people. | |
| So that's what I think he's pushing towards. | |
| And I think he has the support of his coalition to do that. | |
| And there are reports that he's promised the extremist, the ultra-extremist elements of his coalition, because again, his entire coalition, the entire Israeli government, no matter where they are on the spectrum, is extremist. | |
| But he's promised the ultra-ultra extremists that even if there is a ceasefire, he will return to bombing Gaza. | |
| And I think on that basis, he might soon agree to some temporary halt. | |
| But that's the goal here. | |
| And he has full impunity to do that from the Trump administration. | |
| I'd like you to watch a rather emotional statement on all this by a well-known American Jew, the actor Mandy Patinkin. | |
| Watch this, Aaron. | |
| Cut number one. | |
| And I ask Jews all over the world to consider what this man, Benjamin Netanyahu, and his right-wing government is doing to the Jewish people all over the World. | |
| They are endangering not only the state of Israel, which I care deeply about and want to exist, but they are endangering the Jewish population all over the world. | |
| He is the most dangerous thing, not just since October 7th. | |
| It has been a deeply troubled situation for the Jewish people to allow this to happen to children and civilians of all ages in Gaza for whatever reason is unconscionable and unthinkable. | |
| And I ask you Jews everywhere all over the world to spend some time alone and think, is this acceptable and sustainable? | |
| How could it be done to you and your ancestors? | |
| And you turn around and you do it to someone else. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Where are more American Jews speaking like that? | |
| That's a great question. | |
| You know, people are brainwashed. | |
| They've been raised in North American Jewish culture, you know, as I was, although I always had, you know, a distance from it, thankfully, just to believe that Israel is a place of safety and it's sacrosanct and it was founded on a myth, you know, that there was an empty piece of land that Jews returned to because according to our Bible, 2,000 years ago, we were there. | |
| And all that covers up the reality that, in fact, European Jews, most of whom have no ancestral connection at all to Palestine, came and expelled the Arabs who had lived there for hundreds and hundreds of years. | |
| So, you know, let me comment on that statement. | |
| I appreciate what he's saying. | |
| I really do. | |
| And I appreciate the emotion. | |
| And I understand the intended audience is Jewish people. | |
| I personally, though, I don't like framing arguments against what Israel is doing in Gaza in terms of Jewish safety and what's good for the Jewish people in the same way that like, if I were to criticize the Nazi Holocaust, it wouldn't be from the perspective of it's bad for the German people. | |
| It's just wrong, period. | |
| You don't need to qualify by saying it's bad for people. | |
| I understand that that's where he's coming from. | |
| And I don't want to deny him his own, you know, his own perspective. | |
| And it's heartfelt. | |
| And I appreciate what he's saying that how could you suffer a Holocaust under the Nazis and then perpetuate a new one. | |
| Now, I appreciate that. | |
| I just personally, I'm a bit uncomfortable with arguments that are done in the name of Jewish safety. | |
| There's nothing to do with Jewish safety. | |
| This is morally wrong because it's harming Palestinian safety. | |
| It's harming Palestinian existence. | |
| And also, after what, especially what Israel is doing now, I don't want to pay lip service to the security, the well-being of Israel. | |
| That country does not deserve to, I mean, it does not deserve to exist. | |
| It doesn't. | |
| It exists and it has right to, you know, as long as it respects international law, but it's not respecting international law. | |
| It's a out-of-control, crazy state that I think is personally irredeemable. | |
| That society, I think, is just brainwashed at a level that is a threat to everybody. | |
| So I appreciate his sentiment. | |
| I understand that that might reach an audience that I can't reach, but I don't, that particular perspective, I don't fully share. | |
| Thank you, Aaron. | |
| You're so, so level-headed. | |
| Thank you for all this. | |
| I'll be doing some traveling, so we'll see you in a couple of weeks. | |
| All the best, my friend. | |
| Safe travels, Judge. | |
| Enjoy your vacation. | |
| Thank you. | |
| Bye-bye. | |
| Coming up later today at 1 o'clock this afternoon, Professor Glenn Deason at 3 o'clock this afternoon, Professor John Mearsheimer. | |
| At 4 o'clock this afternoon, Max Blumenthal. |
Export Selection