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Sept. 12, 2025 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
32:30
INTEL Roundtable w/ Scott Ritter & Ray McGovern (Larry out this week)
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Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for judging freedom.
Today is Friday, September twelfth, two thousand and twenty-five.
It's the end of the day, the end of the week.
Our favorite segment, the intelligence community roundtable, Ray McGovern is here as always.
Scott Ritter is filling in for the traveling uh Larry Johnson.
If you missed it, Larry and I did a segment a few hours ago uh while he was spending uh uh about an hour or two at the uh Charlotte Airport on his way to a speech he's giving.
And uh it was very instructive uh and most informative on the ballistics involved in the murder of Charlie Kirk.
But to talk about the uh events uh of the week.
Uh Trump's murder of uh 11 people in a speed boat, and now it turns out that the speedboat had turned around uh and was heading back to uh Venezuela, uh perhaps because they saw what was coming after them, but nevertheless it was going back home when these eleven people were killed.
D do you think the American people give a damn uh about the significance of this kind of presidentially ordered extrajudicial execution, Ray McGovern?
I think the intent was to show that we're very powerful.
Um when we when we suffer a reverses, such as was seen to be the case in Beijing over the last two weeks.
My God, we have to show that we can do something.
And I attribute that mostly to uh Trump saying to Pete Pete uh headsick, look, uh Pete, uh what can we do?
And oh, we could Venezuela is a good good opportunity.
Let's get some of those drug smugglers.
It was all kind of uh uh diversion from the from the insults and the uh the the losses we we had at the the at the hands of the rest of the world really and showing us to be no longer the hegemon.
Well, if we can be a hedgering in Latin America.
And if this business about uh uh Colby, Eldridge Colby changing his mind about China and gonna look into Latin America where we can do things.
Well, this is part and parcel of us trying to look big, uh trying to put on big boy pants when uh the chips are down.
Scott, um we've been waiting for 10 days for a legal justification from the government.
There's 150 lawyers that work for the president personally in the West Wing.
There are some of the brightest lawyers in the country who are in what's called the office of legal counsel in the Department of Justice.
None of them has produced any legal justification.
It's hard for me as a lawyer and a former judge and now a person that monitors these things for a living to think of anything worse than the president thinking he can't just kill whoever he wants on his own whim.
Well, it's not just the president.
Um I I think the originator of this thought process is Marco Rubio.
Um, the Secretary of State, the you know, former Florida uh Republican uh Cuban American who has made you know the Latin America South America his own personal uh stomping ground.
And he has been articulating now for um you know on on to six years, um, policies of violence against Venezuela.
And now that he is dual-headed as the Secretary of State, the National Security Advisor, there are literally no constitutional checks uh for what this man can do and what he is doing.
And he's the one that has you know crafted this policy, not PK.
Look, Pete doesn't have the brain on his shoulders to come up with the strategic thinking that uh that Rubio has.
Rubio's been planning this for some time now.
And the proof of the pudding is the document that's actually on the newly minted Secretary of War's desk right now, uh draft national security strategy document that sees America pivoting away, not just from Europe and the Middle East, but from China as well, in order to create Fortress America.
And uh a key aspect to this Fortress America is implementation of a new Monroe Doctrine 2.0 that Marco Rubio's been uh seeking to foist on America for some time now.
And the initiator of this is regime change in Venezuela.
And this is what's happening here.
This is about regime change.
You know, so no, uh the unfortunately we we we have a nation because the president feeds off of the vibe he gets from the people, and the president has sold the American people on the notion that we are a nation at war with narco-traffickers, that uh what they have done in terms of shipping fentanyl over the border and the harm that's done to the American people is the equivalent of war.
These are wartime casualties, and therefore uh it requires a wartime response.
And P. Had Seth, the perpetual battalion uh executive officer, um, is more than happy to deliver, murdering 11 people.
Nobody in the Pentagon can justify this.
Nobody can produce the intelligence that says uh that what this was was actually what they said it was.
They can't prove that.
And even if they could, as you know, Judge, you can't it's against the law to just go out and murder people, and that's what they do.
Do we know if anybody in the Pentagon said you can't do this?
You have to have some second thoughts.
We need some real evidence.
I would have hoped that the trigger pooler would have.
I mean, um, I would have hoped that the trigger pooler would have questioned this.
I would have hoped that the trigger pullers commander would have questioned this.
I would have hoped that his commander would have questioned it.
I hope that the question was gone all the way up to somebody who would have said, no, Mr. President, we uh it's against the law.
This is unconstitutional, it's an illegal order and unlawful order.
But unfortunately, um I think our military has stopped being apolitical.
I think our military now, I mean, just take a look at you know, Pete Kent said, you know, Trump comes in and now they've espoused this new form of American patriotism, and we have people falling over themselves to enlist today.
Why?
Not because they're enlisting to defend America, they're enlisting because they're in love with Trump.
And we have generals now that understand that if you don't kiss up to Trump, you're literally fired the next day.
Look at the head of the intelligence agency who dared challenge uh Trump's you know statements about what was going on in Iran.
He's fired.
No general will survive, and all generals want to survive because you know, you don't you don't get far on a general's retirement where you make your money is getting on those board of directors after you become a you know retirement general, and you're not going to be on a board of directors if the president of the United States fires you.
So everybody's just basically falling over themselves to appease this president.
Ray, is there any way I'm switching gears to the um Israeli attack?
Uh could I just interject here and add a short note to it?
Sure guy.
Um couple of things here.
Um Scott didn't mention it, but uh just so your viewers know uh Venezuela sits on more oil deposits than anywhere else in the world.
Right.
Okay.
It's a little hard to get it up and out because it's real heavy stuff, but they could do it.
Okay, so that's one aspect here.
The other is uh, yeah, the business about this killing of uh other people, including American citizens, as a bipartisan affair.
Well, it's let's be fair here.
I mean, you take Eric Holder, uh, attorney general for Obama, who explained these uh explained these drone strikes on American citizens.
And so, look, look, look what the law says.
It says without due process, uh that doesn't mean judicial process.
We do do, yeah, we do dual process right here in the White House.
Thank you very much.
So this is a kind of an erosion of morality of law, respectful law that goes back to well, Obama and farther back.
That doesn't excuse it, of course, but that prepares a way to say, well, Obama did it, you know, as they so often.
Ray, you're 100% correct.
I read those memos.
Uh they were leaked to NBC News, and somebody at NBC sent it to me at Fox, And Fox let me go on air uh immediately about it.
They were uh childish, poor role, uh, would have flunked any course on constitutional law, but they were delivered uh over the name of the uh attorney general of the United States of the president, which allowed him to kill in this case to Americans, Anwar al-Alaqi.
Now, just to kind of a footnote to that, I mean, Eric Holder uh expatiated on this new doctrine about you need judicial problem.
No, you don't need you need whatever you need, just we do the process here at Northwestern University Law School, one of the finest, okay.
And my point is simply this.
Uh why how did the students react to that?
Oh my god, oh wow, that's interesting.
Take a note on that might be on the final exam.
So we can uh we could do uh do process right at the White House.
I mean, it's it's like Russophobia in the intelligence community, the legal profession has been well, you know better than I judge.
You can you couldn't uh supply the adjectives.
Chris, uh play cut number 16, and then Scott, I'm gonna ask you if it is in any way conceivable that Trump did not know about the Israeli attack on Qatar before it happened.
Well, I'm not thrilled.
I'm not thrilled about it.
This one's more like a conversation.
I don't have to do that.
I'm just I'm not thrilled about uh the whole situation.
It's not not a good situation.
But I will say this, we want the hostages back.
But we are not thrilled about the way that went down today.
The Press: Did you know about you advance, Mr. President?
Did Israel tell you to advance?
The President: No.
You were caught by surviving.
I'm never I'm never surprised by anything, especially when it comes to the Middle East.
How did you vote about this happening?
I'll be giving a full statement tomorrow, but uh I would uh tell you this.
I was very unhappy about it, very unhappy about every aspect, and uh we got to get the hostages back.
But I was very unhappy about the way that went down.
I don't know if the Secretary of Defense or war, whatever he calls himself, really has a job.
He seems to be standing like a mannequin behind Trump wherever he is.
And by the way, on the other side of Hag Seth, not shown in this film, was the national security advisor who was also the Secretary of State.
Scotty, tell us how we know that the U.S. absolutely, not must have known, but absolutely knew what the Israelis were up to.
Well, there's two things.
First of all, uh everybody who watches your show knows that we have um hundreds, if not more than a thousand American soldiers on the ground in Syria as we speak, with more uh continuing to operate uh in Iraq.
Flying overhead are combat air patrols.
Uh, you know, we we maintain a constant uh presence of uh combat aircraft, drones, etc., flying over both Syria and Iraq.
Uh this includes not just the um kinetic uh aircraft, the fighter bombers, etc., but also electronic warfare aircraft, uh refueling aircraft, um intelligence gathering aircraft, AWACS.
Uh we always have an AWACS up and uh running, controlling the airspace.
Um, and and that's what it's about, controlling the airspace.
That means that nothing enters this airspace without our permission.
This is why we have what are what's known as IFF, identify friend or foe.
Um and you know, going back to 1991 in the Gulf War, you know, Israel wanted to uh send aircraft into Western Iraq to hunt down Iraqi scud missiles because they said the United States wasn't doing a good enough job.
And at that time, we made we we uh you know looked over deconfliction, what would be required in exchange of IFF code so that when Israeli aircraft entered this airspace, they would squawk as a friend, not as an enemy, and we wouldn't shoot them down.
We'd also deconflict the airspace, making sure that our aircraft weren't in the same place the Israelis.
In the end of the day, we told the Israelis to pound sand.
You don't get to come in here, and they did because they would have been shot down.
Uh that's how I know.
Because here, in order to accept what you know, the Israelis did, they took 15 aircraft off from Israel, flew over Syria, flew over Iraq through airspace control by the United States military, and then they entered an attack profile against Qatar, home of the largest, most strategically important American air base in the Middle East.
And um, and to say that we didn't know about this, the deconfliction takes place well in advance of the action that requires deconfliction.
It's not something you do spontaneously.
This is the same thing.
what is deconfliction mean?
Again, deconfliction means that when Israeli aircraft enters airspace control by the United States, we deconflict.
We make sure that we um not only recognize them as friends, which requires us to exchange uh IFF codes, but we also move out of their way.
We don't interfere with their operations.
We make sure that our aircraft aren't flying in the same airspace.
Is it is it conceivable that Trump himself didn't know, whether it's from Netanyahu, whether it's from some official in the Israeli government, whether it's from Hegseth, whether it's from Rubio.
No.
He's the commander-in-chief of the United States military.
The military would not uh engage in in an action of this sort without getting clearance from the White House or from the Secretary of Defense.
And the Secretary of Defense wouldn't give clearance without getting authority from the National Security Advisor, who's not in the chain of command, by the way, but who advises the president, and that means that the president of the United States has to be informed.
I don't like calling people liars, but I'm straight up telling you right now, Donald Trump is lying through his teeth.
He knew about this in advance, and he gave the green light to Israel to do this, and he ordered the American military to stand aside and let it happen.
Ray, wouldn't the CIA have known about this?
Wouldn't John Ratcliffe and Tulsi Gabbard have known about this in advance?
They should have, but not necessarily, Judge.
You keep things like this very close hold.
There was no doubt somebody in Mossad that uh shared that with somebody in the CIA.
Well, whether it got very far up to Radcliffe or even to Tulsi, it's really they do these things uh extracurricularly and they do things without coordinating.
So it's not a safe bet that they coordinated this with the intelligence folks.
Can I just uh can I add just a comment on that?
Sure.
Uh, when it comes to Israel, though, uh things are different.
If you remember uh Muganea, whose name I'm butchering right now, but he was the uh Hezbollah operative who blew up the um you know the Americ uh the marine barracks in 19 uh in in the 1980s.
Yeah, and then he was uh he was subsequently assassinated uh in Damascus by Israel.
But it was a joint intelligence operation.
Uh the CIA was wired into this operation, and the CIA actually had to um de-conflict at the end because we couldn't give permission to kill him.
We had to turn it over to the Israelis who had eyes on target, and they were sharing these eyes on target with the United States.
And the reason why I'm bringing this up is uh when the president cleared Hamas to be killed, that means that the CIA's directorate of operations uh that is closely linked with the Israeli intelligence action teams.
There were Israeli eyes on target.
Uh, they were monitoring the movement of these people, monitoring their cell phones, monitoring their location, because Israel isn't going to fire six missiles uh into in the Doha by accident.
Um they have to know that the target's there, and they have to ensure that the airspace is clear.
Remember, there's an active international airport in Doha.
Um nobody issued a no TAMS.
These airplanes were still flying.
And this again requires a level of coordination that's unprecedented and very complex.
And the United States was involved.
This goes beyond the military.
This goes into, I believe, the CIA, the directorate of operations, who were knee-deep in this.
And while they may not have uh greenlit the firing of the missiles, they are aware of everything the Israelis did because we jointly target Hamas, Hezbollah, the Iranians, terrorists.
Uh the Israelis don't operate unilaterally on targets outside of Israel uh without getting the Americans plugged in.
And the in the case of Mugania in Damascus proves that.
The same thing, remember, uh Suleimani.
Suleimani was a joint Israeli American operation up until the last second when the Israelis backed out, um, leaving Donald Trump hanging on his own.
But the Israelis were the ones that were tracking uh uh Suleimani from uh Damascus into Baghdad, providing the airplane number you uh had control of the assets on the ground that they turned over to the United States to report the movement.
It was a joint Israeli American assassination of Suleimani that the Israelis pulled out at the last second.
Wow.
Can I uh ask a question here of uh Scott?
Um please back in 1983 during the Marine Marine Barracks uh devastation, 141 Marines killed.
Uh I seem to recollect that there was good information that the Israelis knew about it beforehand and did not tell us.
Am I imagining that, Scott, or is that your impression as well?
No, there's there's I mean, I have to be careful here, but there's information that suggests this.
Um, that the Israelis uh remember there was some uh friction between the Marines and the Israelis.
Um an incident where a Marine captain forced Israeli tanks to uh to back away at gunpoint because uh he said you're not crossing through my lines.
Um and the United States uh was impeding Israel's golden objective of eliminating the Palestinian liberation organization and its leader, Yasser Arafat.
And so I think what uh what happened is the Israelis were aware of.
I'm not saying they planned it, but there is sufficient evidence uh that exists that suggests the Israelis were aware of this attack and they didn't uh warn the United States because they wanted this attack to occur because they wanted the United States to withdraw from southern Lebanon.
The same thing that's as bad as that's as bad as the Liberty, isn't it?
It is as bad as the Liberty.
Yeah, yeah.
They're not our friends.
I mean, again, I just want to highlight this point.
Israel's not our friends, they're not our allies, they don't do anything for our benefit.
People need to understand that they have the blood of hundreds of Americans on their hands.
Many uh people on this show from the academics uh Mir Scheimer and Sachs to the two of you and Larry um uh and uh Colonel uh McGregor and Colonel Wilkerson have made the same argument very uh very uh compellingly.
Uh Ray, does the CIA know if the uh drones, the Russian drones that were shot down over Poland were sent by Moscow or were diverted by Ukraine, or were an innocent, honest accent?
I'm not sure if the CIA knows.
Uh what I am sure of is that the Russians have been very open about this, say, let's get together with you Polish people to figure out what happened.
I think there's great uncertainty as to what happened.
What we do know is that these drones were inert, no explosives in them.
Maybe they were decoys, how they got uh how they got into Poland.
Then we have the yellow Russians warning the poles up a bunch of uh bunch of missiles, a bunch of uh drones are coming your way.
Watch out.
I mean, the whole thing cries out for uh an investigation, and it's interesting.
Uh, will the polls accept the invitation to kind of get through to figure out what the bottom line is or what really happened?
Was it a mistake?
Uh you can be sure that the Russian if the Russians were trying to start a war, uh they would pick other ways to do this.
Scotty, what is your understanding uh of the incident of which we speak and who was responsible for it?
Well, my understanding is that the Belarusians um, when they warned the polls, and I just want to remind everybody that the Belarusians warned the poles, and the Belarusian military uh operates in a command center that's co-located with the Russians.
So the Russians were aware of the warning and actually approved it.
Now, why would Russia approve the other risk warning Poland if Russia was trying to attack Poland?
I mean, the logic falls apart immediately.
But they said it's coming in.
They said we don't know how this happened.
We don't know if these are deliberately targeted, uh, but there is evidence of significant electronic warfare taking place because the uh the Russians were sending drones in to attack targets in western Ukraine at this time.
Um they said they could be diverted by electronic warfare.
It turns out that none of these drones were actually attacked drones, uh, that all of them were styrofoam decoy drones that the Russians flood the zone with in order to activate uh Ukrainian air defense, etc.
These things are disposable.
Uh they're one way, they don't come home.
Um, And the Ukrainians have retrieved significant numbers of them.
And what appears to have happened is that the Ukrainians took these drones and they they sent them on into Poland.
But this was a Ukrainian attack designed to do what?
Look, Ukraine's won on this one.
Now you have NATO starting to surge air defense capability into Poland with the idea of extending that into Western Ukraine.
This is what the Poland wanted all along.
Are there 40,000 Polish troops amassing at the Polish-Russian border as has been reported earlier today?
Not Russian border.
The Polish Belarusian border, yeah.
40, 40,000, 10,000 originally, 30,000 uh coming up.
Um it's nothing.
Uh it's it's literally a nothing burger.
Uh, they're not combat troops, they're not prepared to carry out offensive operations, and they would be killed in place if they actually tried to do something.
But it's just part of the overall posturing that's taking place right now, which is what Ukraine wanted.
You see, last week, remember Europe was saying we can't send any troops in.
We don't have, we're not gonna do this.
No, no, no.
Now, because of what Poland did or what Ukraine did, uh, now you have Europe standing tall.
They're not going into Western Ukraine, they're not peacekeepers, but they're surging capability in, and it's compelling Europe to take a look at air defense, because think about it.
18 styrofoam dunny dummy drones penetrated Polish airspace, and they only shot down two of them.
Um, if this was the real deal, Poland would be eviscerated.
It's an embarrassment for Poland, it's an embarrassment for NATO.
This is what Ukraine wanted.
This is actually a strategic victory for Ukraine.
I don't know how it's going to ultimately manifest itself, but they wanted NATO to become activist, and now NATO is activist.
All right, so NATO's activist.
Uh here's uh Secretary General, I think that's his title, Ruta, sounding absolutely absurd.
This is about 42 seconds long.
Listen to how he refers to Vladimir Putin in the last line of this clip.
This will give you both heartburn, even though it's ridiculous.
Chris cut number six.
Yes, but why are we interested in what Russia thinks about troops in Ukraine?
It's a sovereign country.
It's not for them to decide.
I'm really amazed.
I'm not I'm not criticizing you, but I hear this question, of course, more often.
So thank you for asking the question.
But I'm really amazed.
It's Russia has nothing to do with this.
Uh it's it's the same like uh Finland's uh then should have had um a sort of um a not uh uh yes from Russia to Jordan NATO?
No, of course not.
And Sweden?
No.
Uh in the past, uh, the fact that we founded NATO, we are sovereign nations.
Uh Ukraine is a sovereign nation.
If Ukraine uh wants to have uh security guarantee forces in Ukraine uh to uh support the peace, it's up to them.
Nobody else can decide about it.
I think we really have to stop making Putin too powerful.
He is he is the governor of Texas, not more.
So is that an insult to George W. Bush?
Or is it consistent with his deranged thinking about whether or not a sovereign country should or should not be concerned about an adversary at its border, Ray McGovern.
Can I handle that one?
Uh yes.
His predecessor, Jens Stoltenberg, two years ago got up before the EU parliament and said the Russians said that if you try to get Ukraine and NATO, we will have to invade Ukraine.
And so we said, no.
And so they invaded Ukraine.
But we got NATO enlargement anyhow.
Finland and Sweden.
My God.
By that time, there's over a million young Ukrainians and Russians killed because of this idiot policy of not saying, okay, we'll stop trying to get Ukraine into NATO.
So this is a guy.
He even mentions the same Finland and Sweden.
Like Finland and Sweden, enlarging NATO.
That's a black bar to get Russia.
Give me a break.
Ukraine is is is essential as a uh a quintessential factor in Russian planning.
Obama knew that.
That's why he wouldn't send offensive missiles, because as he put it, the worst thing we could do for the Ukrainians would be to give them the idea that they could prevail against the much stronger Russia.
And now Trump has said precisely the same thing.
The Ukrainians have fought very hard, but they're not strong enough.
Russia is much stronger.
So the earliest we can get this damn thing stopped.
And I think Putin and Trump both want to do that.
The earliest we can get the thing stopped, the better.
killing stopping the killing should be appealing to most people some people accepted like that yahoo but the the argument is compelling this is biden's war um Let's stop the killing.
And I think it will take a couple more months, but I think there will be some sort of cover for the Russian victory.
It depends on how much lipstick that Putin will be able to supply, so they put it on the feet on the pig of defeat that will emerge from this war for NATO for Russia.
I don't know, for NATO, for Ukraine and for the US.
Scotty, Ruta's uh argument is really uh absurd, but unfortunately it appears to be shared by the three uh leaders of countries whose governments are about to collapse France, Great Britain, and Germany.
Well, you know, the only person that's weaker in Europe than you know, who recently was reminded by nations like Poland and France that she commands nothing.
She uh she can talk about defense spending and this she she has no say in it.
The only person weaker than her is Mark Rutte.
He may be the Secretary General of NATO, but he has no authority.
You know, he can't pick up a phone and order divisions to move.
He can't order aircraft to move, he has no power, zero.
So for him to sit there and say things as if he's some sort of big man is laughable.
And the Russians laugh at this too.
Um, because if what he said was true, then why doesn't he order NATO troops into Ukraine?
Because he doesn't have the authority to order them, and even if he did, the sovereign states of Europe would say no.
France has already said no, we're not sending troops.
Uh Germany, no, we're not sending troops.
England, we don't have any troops to send.
Um, this is this is just I mean, we're we're literally watching bad theater um play out before us.
Uh the good news is that the United States isn't buying into any, because understand, every every European nation that speaks about this intervention, they always say, um, but we need American backstop.
And Trump has said, no, no.
It's funny too, Ruth.
Russia has no veto over a sovereign state.
Well, America apparently does, right, Mark?
Are you gonna tell Trump to pound sand?
I dare you to tell Trump to pound sand, because then you'll be out of a job.
You'll be fired in a week or in a day.
Uh so this the stupidity of NATO, the stupidity of the NATO leadership is on display right now.
But the reality is Russia just doesn't care.
Russia's got a winning strategy, and they're implementing this winning strategy, and there's nothing, Mark Rutte, NATO, Poland, the EU, Van der Leyen.
Nobody.
There's nothing anybody can do to stop them.
Let me go back always if if I may, and just uh put a codicle to that.
Go ahead.
Uh I was around when Rushov uh could have said the same thing that Ruta has just said.
Cuba has the absolute right to invite any kind of weaponry, any kind of alliances that it wants, and uh so we're gonna keep those medium-range ballistic missiles in there, so shove it there, uh, Kennedy.
But Khrushchev was a realist, and he realized that even though that may be literally so when there's a an existential threat and then and a great power can can do what's necessary to meet that threat that uh Kennedy could and did, and so Khrushchev fought the missiles back, okay.
Now, what happened here?
Putin's uh got got into um Ukraine.
It was not unprovoked, it wasn't large scale, it wasn't even illegal in my view.
But he went in there, and it's not going to go out because uh it's just a matter of what great powers do when they feel threatened by little powers that can't really contend with them in the final analysis.
Gentlemen, thank you very much.
Much appreciated.
Uh, you're both doing uh double duty for us, and we'll see you both uh early next week.
All the best.
Have a great weekend.
Thank you.
And coming up next week, of course, on Monday at eight in the morning, Alistair Crook at ten in the morning, uh Ray McGovern, Larry Johnson at 5 30 in the afternoon, probably Scott Ritter at some time uh in the afternoon.
Uh we of course will let you know uh well in advance.
Thank you for watching.
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