Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano - Aaron Maté : Russiagate and Obama.

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July 28, 2025 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano

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Aaron Maté : Russiagate and Obama.

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	Hi, everyone.
	Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
	Today is Tuesday, July 29th, 2025.
	Aaron Monte joins us now.
	Aaron, it's a pleasure.
	I want to explore your views since you done so much research and know so much about this on RussiaGate and Obama.
	But before we get to RussiaGate and the recent revelations, a few questions on Israel and a few questions on Ukraine.
	Do you sense a consensus building either internationally or just in certain pockets that the IDF is in fact engaged in genocide and people who are looking the other way are now suddenly speaking out about it?
	I certainly see that consensus among ordinary citizens.
	Two Israeli groups, Physicians for Human Rights and Beth Selim, of the major human rights organizations inside Israel, they just joined the chorus of voices calling this a genocide.
	Of course, they did this much too late, but better late than never.
	So it's impossible to ignore now that the phase of the genocide in Gaza is an Israeli-imposed starvation crisis, famine, as a top hunger watchdog has just warned today.
	So in the face of all this, in the face of the cruelty openly displayed by Israel, in the face of the images of emaciated children, of people burned in their tents and what's left of their homes and bombed every single day, how can you not reach this conclusion?
	It's only just the Trump administration and its allies in both sides of the aisle that are holding on to this myth about Israel defending itself.
	Everybody else knows exactly what is going on.
	And what you are seeing now among U.S. politicians, it's some attempts to save face of what they've supported.
	So now you have prominent Democrats, people like Amy Klobuchar, Barack Obama breaking his silence, all coming out and saying that Israel has to let the people of Gaza get aid because it's being blockaded.
	But where have they been this whole time?
	Wasn't it absurd and even painful?
	It was for me to watch this.
	Donald Trump sitting next to Sakir Stormer, the British prime minister, wringing his hands over starvation in Gaza.
	Starvation that he has financed, funded, caused, and promoted.
	It's worse because Trump also said that he complained that no one said thank you for the $60 million that he said the U.S. has spent on Gaza aid, which actually is spent on propping up a fake aid group, the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which is a U.S.-funded Israeli front group that's been used to destroy the existing aid system inside Gaza run by the UN, replace its more than 400 aid sites with just four for the people of Gaza.
	And at those aid sites, Palestinians have been gunned down.
	More than 1,100 Palestinians have been killed lining up for food at these so-called aid sites run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.
	Then Israeli civilians were killed on October 7th.
	And when you say the October 7th figure, you have to include the fact that some of those Israeli civilians were killed by Israel when it enacted the Hannibal Directive.
	So Trump then not only talks about, yeah, we have to do something about the starvation crisis now when he's the one fueling it.
	And by the way, two months ago, he said people are starving and today he promised to take care of it, has done absolutely nothing.
	But not only that, he's also complaining that he's not being thanked enough while presiding over a deliberate mass starvation crisis on the Palestinian people.
	Here's a very, very, very, three very close friend of President Trump's who disagrees with him as to whether or not there is government perpetrated starvation in Gaza.
	Chris Cutt, number 17.
	Israel is presented as though we are applying a campaign of starvation in Gaza.
	What a bold-faced lie.
	There is no policy of starvation in Gaza, and there is no starvation in Gaza.
	We've enabled the amount required by international law to come in.
	There are hundreds and hundreds of trucks loaded with tons.
	So far we've supplied 1.9 million tons of food since the beginning of the world.
	Almost 2 million tons.
	And now we have hundreds of trucks that are waiting on the Gazan side of the Karem Shalom crossing.
	And it's international organizations, some of them very well intended.
	And it's the UN too.
	Food that they purchased.
	And we said, go ahead, deliver.
	And they say, we can't because combat is going on.
	And we say, yes, we're combat, we'll fight.
	Where we're fighting, we'll continue to fight.
	But there are safe corridors.
	You can bring the food to anywhere you want.
	That is not a problem.
	The account for lies.
	This turns my, this is the second time I watch this from beginning to end.
	It turns my stomach each time.
	And he's lying on so many levels, including the fact that the World Food Program tried to make a delivery a few days ago, and they were attacked by Israeli forces.
	So not only is Israel firing on desperate aid seekers, starving people, they're also firing, as they have throughout this whole genocide, firing on UN food deliveries.
	He's also admitting the fact that Israel has blocked UN trucks since March.
	They've imposed a total blockade since March.
	And they've told the UN that even to the small extent you're allowed to distribute food, you have to work with the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which these aid groups have refused to do for obvious reasons.
	This is not an aid group.
	This is an Israeli front used to kill Palestinians.
	And they don't want to be complicit in a Scam that's being used to kill people because it violates all basic principles of humanitarian aid.
	And that's the cynical game that Netanyahu is playing.
	And the reason why he's destroyed the UN food system inside of Gaza is because he wants to basically make Gaza unlivable and force people to leave.
	And the UN system inside Gaza has kept people alive.
	And just to underscore this, one of the main allegations from Netanyahu in Israel was that they can't allow in all these aid groups is because Hamas is stealing the aid.
	Well, the New York Times just came out with an article citing four sources, including two senior Israeli military officials, acknowledging that they had no proof actually that Hamas was stealing aid on any type of significant scale.
	And in fact, the UN aid system was working very, very efficiently.
	And if you look at it, just look at the numbers, more than 400 aid sites from the UN giving aid to the people of Gaza down to just four.
	And most, all three of those, three of them, all but one are in the south, which means that if you're anywhere aside from, even if you're in the south, you have to walk for incredibly long stretches to even have the hope of getting aid at one of these sites if you're not gunned down by Israeli forces, either on the way or once you get there.
	I'm going to ask you if Israeli society is broken, but before you answer, watch this, cut number 18.
	A moral bankruptcy.
	That while our hostages are in Gaza, our prime minister is transferring humanitarian aid to Gaza.
	I think that at this stage, the only thing that should have been sent to Gaza is one thing, bombs.
	Bomb, conquer, encourage immigration, and win the war.
	I guess this guy is the worst of the worst.
	That was Ben Gavir, who believes Netanyahu that they're supplying aid and condemns him for saying that they're doing so.
	Correct.
	And, you know, people like to portray defenders of Israel like to portray him as being on the fringe, even though he's a high-ranking minister.
	But he represents Israeli society.
	If you look at polls, Israelis support this.
	They do see Palestine civilians as being inherently criminal and worthy of expulsion and genocide.
	So he's exactly the face of Israel, just as Netanyahu is, with all of his lies and deceit.
	Yesterday in Scotland, while seated next to Prime Minister Starmer, President Trump threatened President Putin.
	You don't end the war in 10 or 12 days or else?
	What else is there?
	How does this man, the President of the United States, so profoundly misunderstand the nature, the history, the interactions, and the Russian mentality as to think that this threat will miraculously result in the war being over in 10 to 12 days?
	Yeah, and he's also not only threatening Russia, but now threatening other countries too, because to go through with this threat, he'll have to put on secondary sanctions with countries that do business with Russia.
	That's the basis for the sanctions measure pushed by Lindsey Graham and Richard Blumenthal.
	So as Trump is struggling to wage his trade war that he began earlier this year, now he's going to open up a brand new front with secondary sanctions over the Ukraine war, a war that he vowed to end.
	It's completely contradictory and it's incoherent.
	And I just don't think he's decided what he wants to do.
	What he's certainly not doing is saying to Putin, let's sit down and try to work out an agreement, which is really the only way I think that this could be resolved because Russia now has made this war far more about far more than just the Donbass conflict, which could have been resolved with the Minsk Accords, but Ukraine and the U.S. refused to implement.
	Now it's also about NATO expansion, the placement of NATO military infrastructure close to Russia's border that can threaten it, the so-called missile defense sites in Poland and Romania that can be easily reused for offensive attacks on Russia.
	Trump dismantling the INF Treaty in his first term, which had previously capped an entire class of offensive weapons.
	Now those weapons can be used and pointed at Russia.
	Russia wants to address all these things.
	And Russia tried to address them with Biden, who wasn't interested.
	And now Trump has to decide, does he want to continue the Biden policy or choose a different course?
	And so far, although he's not very enthusiastic about arming Ukraine, and I don't think he'll be going before Congress to ask for more money to arm Ukraine, he hasn't put the effort in to sit down with Russia and try to address its concerns and end the war.
	Do we know when the last Biden tranche of money and arms runs out?
	Or is that a joke?
	Because the Pentagon can't pass an audit.
	They probably don't know how much they've sent over there.
	Well, you know, there's a line from the sitcom, arrested development.
	There's always money in the banana stand.
	And that's how it feels at Casey.
	Even if officially there's not the appropriation to justify or to send weapons to Ukraine, that they can always find a way if they want to, even if it's not appropriated by Congress.
	But look, yeah, eventually it will run out.
	And the question for Ukraine is, you know, how many people will they run out of by then?
	Because this is a country that's really struggling.
	There was a recent Ukrainian media account that says that Ukraine's lost 40% of its working age population.
	And you see these continued videos of people being kidnapped off the street.
	Whereas Russia, if you look at the polls, Putin still has support if you take those polls seriously, and I do.
	And there's so many more people in Russia.
	And Russia's been able to sustain the attacks on its economy that Joe Biden bragged were going to leave, turn the ruble into rubble.
	That hasn't happened.
	So Russia is just in a far stronger position here than Ukraine is.
	And no matter what Trump says, I just don't think he's going to back it up with more music.
	Here's somebody who profoundly disagrees with you.
	It's the president of the United States claiming the Russians have lost a million troops.
	I don't know where he pulls these numbers out.
	Watch this.
	This is earlier today, I think, with Sir Kier Starmer as well.
	Number 15, Chris.
	Have you had any other trading channels, conversations with the Russians?
	Reiterating this?
	In what?
	Reiterating this new pressure and deadline.
	Yeah, we're going to have a, Yeah, I mean, well, you're the press.
	I'm reiterating it to you.
	Yeah, I'd say 10 to 12 days.
	I'll announce it probably tonight or tomorrow.
	But there's no reason to wait.
	If you know what the answer is going to be, why wait?
	And it it would be sanctions and maybe tariffs, secondary tariffs.
	You know what a secondary tariff is.
	And look, the Russian economy, I don't want to do that to Russia.
	I love the Russian people.
	They're great people.
	I don't want to do that to Russia.
	But this thing, they're losing a lot of Russians.
	They've lost a million Russians.
	And that's the, you know, sons, that's the sons and daughters of Russian families.
	They leave the house, they go bye, mom, bye, dad, and then they get blown away.
	Is there any basis?
	Is there any credible statistical analysis that shows the Russian loss anywhere near a million troops?
	I have no idea.
	I've always shied away from these stats because I have no way to corroborate them myself.
	It strikes me as being pretty overblown, a million Russian soldiers.
	I don't buy that.
	But again, I have no way of confirming for sure.
	And certainly, whenever there's been exchanges of bodies between Ukraine and Russia, from what I've read, it's always a lot more Ukrainian bodies being given over to Ukraine than Russian bodies being given over to Russia, which makes sense to me given Russia's numerical advantage, which is why, again, it was such a disaster to launch this proxy war in the first place.
	Has the Epstein saga tainted Trump as at least a bystander aware of what was going on?
	Yeah, well, judging by his behavior, it certainly has, because, look, a lot of his top influencers, people like Dan Bongino, who's now the deputy director of the FBI, really hyped up the Epstein thing and accused the government under Joe Biden of covering up a sprawling pedophile ring and blackmail conspiracy.
	And now they come into office and Trump says everyone should stop talking about it.
	And there have been reports coming out that Trump wrote a birthday card to Epstein and they were friends.
	Epstein said that Trump and him were very, very tight.
	And Trump has admitted before on tape to being a sexual predator, his famous or infamous Access Hollywood tape.
	So it wouldn't surprise me if Trump has something to hide.
	Now, my opinion here is that this Epstein thing has been overblown by everybody.
	I don't see any evidence to support the Maximalist view that Epstein was an intelligence agent blackmailing people.
	I don't think you need to blackmail people in the U.S. to go along with Israel, for example.
	APAC just buys people off and buys out, oust the people that they don't want.
	APAC does a pretty good job of that.
	But it does look the way Trump is handling us that he is embarrassed by it.
	And that makes sense, given that him and Epstein were close, just as Bill Clinton, who, unlike Trump, went to Epstein's island, also probably isn't happy that this is getting public attention.
	Was Epstein a Mossad asset?
	I've seen no evidence to support that.
	I know people really believe this.
	I understand why Israel is a criminal regime committing acts of just unspeakable evil and does really shady things around the world to advance their agenda.
	So I totally get why he's suspected as being a Mossad agent.
	And given the fact that Ghislaine Maxwell's father also was tied to Israel, I get the suspicion, but I personally haven't seen the evidence for it.
	And I do think there's a danger here that if the Epstein Mossad thing is being overblown, that you're actually, people are going to undermine the legitimate reasons to criticize Israel and Israel's influence over U.S. politics.
	I think people should be at least be mindful of that.
	Although, listen, I'm all for anything that brings scrutiny to Israel because that's that, to me, it's the issue of our time.
	So if Epstein is the vehicle for it, okay.
	I just personally, I can't sign on to that theory because I just haven't seen the evidence for it.
	Did Tulsi Gabbard reveal anything about Russia Gate that we didn't already know?
	Or did she reinforce what people like you and I have said for years that the government was spying directly or indirectly via GCHQ on Trump going back to 2015?
	The GCHQ component, I don't think, is revealed in this latest batch of releases.
	I know your guest, Larry Johnson, has done a lot of work on this and talked about it.
	And I'll be curious to find out more.
	But what I think is most significant about Tulsi Gabbard's disclosures is the core allegation at the heart of Russia gate, which is that Russia, as part of an effort to help Trump, stole Democratic Party emails and gave them to WikiLeaks.
	This was the core allegation that everybody was obsessed with for years and years during Trump's first term.
	And if you question that allegation, you were a Russian asset.
	How dare you question the consensus of the intelligence community?
	That was the dominant mindset back then.
	Well, now we know, because Tulsi Gabbard has released it, that right before the election in 2016, there was an intelligence community assessment that we only got now, nearly nine years later.
	And what did it say?
	The FBI and the NSA had low confidence that Russia was behind the hacking and leaking of Democratic Party emails.
	And rather than tell the public that, we were told the opposite, that the intelligence community had high confidence that Russia was behind the hack and leak.
	And that was the basis for its sprawling interference campaign to install Trump.
	So serious countervailing evidence was concealed from the public.
	And that to me is the biggest scandal here.
	And it reinforces what I've been saying all along, which is that, yes, some U.S. intelligence officials like James Clapper, John Brennan, Robert Mueller, they told us that Russia hacked and linked these emails, but there was never any evidence for it.
	And in fact, all the available evidence undermined that Russia hacking allegation, including the fact that CrowdStrike, which was the Clinton campaign contractor that first accused Russia of hacking the DNC, they admitted under oath to Congress that actually, yeah, we have no concrete evidence of Russian hacking.
	And that was by the intelligence community for very many years.
	And now we're only getting new details about the fraud that was perpetrated on the public.
	You will enjoy this.
	It's from 2016.
	You'll know why I'm laughing in a second.
	And 2017, Chris Cut number two.
	The Russians did it.
	It was the Russians who tried to interfere in our election.
	Every member of the committee agrees it was the Russians.
	They didn't Change the outcome, but they did release information embarrassing to the Democratic Party.
	It did affect Hillary Clinton.
	There's only one person in Washington that I know of that has any doubt about what Russia did in our election and is President Trump.
	Oh, times change.
	They do.
	It turns out it wasn't just Trump, it was also the FBI and the NSA.
	And that was kept from the public until now, which is a massive scandal.
	And the reason why the FBI and the NSA doubted this Russian hacking-linking allegation is they say in this suppressed intelligence assessment that they don't have the technical evidence for it, which is exactly what I've been saying for now for eight years.
	And this is why I never went along with Russia Gate or one of the reasons along with the conspiracy theory that Trump was a Russian asset, which I just thought was one of the dumbest things I've ever heard.
	We were told that Russia hacked and leaked these emails, but we never got any evidence.
	And the job of a journalist is to go with what the facts are.
	And instead, our media acted as stenographers for people like John Brennan and Lindsey Graham.
	And by the way, why did Lindsey Graham go with all this?
	Because he's a Trump, you know, he's a Trump ally after all.
	Well, Lindsey Graham immediately used the Russian hacking allegations to push the proxy war in Ukraine.
	John McCain and Lindsey Graham went to Ukraine in late 2016, early 2017.
	And they said on the way back, you know, Russia has attacked our democracy, and this is why we have to push back against them, including in Ukraine.
	So, and one of the reasons why I felt compelled to take a strong stance on this because I always felt RussiaGate was fueling geopolitical tensions.
	It was fueling animus toward Russia.
	It's a point that my late mentor, Stephen F. Cohen, a professor at Princeton and NYU, esteemed Russia scholar, he would constantly make.
	And we've seen the result.
	I mean, I don't think we would have had, well, I shouldn't say we wouldn't have had, but certainly RussiaGate played a major role in fueling the escalation of the Ukraine war.
	And we're still paying the price.
	Wow.
	Aaron, a pleasure.
	Well, actually, before we sign off, is there another tranche that's about to, of documents that Gabbard's about to release?
	And if so, do we know what it covers?
	This speaks to another critical piece of information that was kept from the public until years later.
	In 2020, John Ratcliffe, now the director of the CIA, he revealed that in July 2016, right before the FBI kicked off the Trump-Russia probe, that John Brennan briefed Obama on intelligence that he had picked up that Russia was aware of a plot to frame Trump as a Russian asset and to tie him to Russian interference in the election.
	So we only learned about this four years later, that Obama and Brennan were aware of a Hillary Clinton campaign plot to frame Trump as a Russian asset.
	And rather than put a stock to it or tell the public about it, they helped Hillary Clinton do it by the Trump-Russia investigation and the intelligence community assessment that Brennan oversaw.
	So they were in on this.
	And so what John Durham did in his report is produce an annex detailing what he calls the Clinton plan intelligence.
	And when John Durham's report was released, this was two years ago now, 2023, that annex was kept from the public.
	Now the Trump administration is going to declassify Durham's annex all about the Clinton plot, which I can't wait to read.
	Right.
	And John Durham, as I recall, indicted one person, some young assistant lawyer in the FBI who got a slap on the wrist for falsifying documents submitted to FISA to get a search warrant to listen to George Papadopoulos.
	This stuff was like Groundhog Day.
	We've heard this over and over again.
	We're in a 2016 loop constantly.
	But this is what happens when you frame a campaign as Russian assets and use the U.S. intelligence community to launch that scam, to advance that scam.
	There's going to be accountability, even if it takes a while.
	And for a long time, in Trump's first term, people like Cash Patel were trying to get these same documents declassified, but people like Gina Haspel and Mark Esper and William Barr were pushing back because they didn't want to embarrass the national security state because this is embarrassing for them.
	But now it's a different ballgame and we're getting, thankfully, some new information.
	And even if Trump is 100% motivated here by trying to distract from Epstein or whatever else, I mean, that might be true, but I don't really care.
	The question is, is this material factual and is this important?
	And the answer is yes to both those questions, because this was a massive scam perpetrated on the U.S. public with massive consequences that we're still experiencing today.
	Aaron Mate, thank you, my dear friend.
	You're a font of knowledge on Russia Gator, and I'm sure there'll be a lot more for you to analyze for us.
	And I thank you for allowing me to go all over the place from Kier Starmer to Zelensky to slaughter and starvation in Gaza to Tulsa Gabbard.
	Thank you, my friend.
	We'll see you again soon.
	See you soon, Judge.
	Thanks for having me.
	All the best.

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