Nov. 17, 2025 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
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LtCOL. Karen Kwiatkowski : Quick Draw Pete Breaking the Pentagon
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Hi, everyone.
Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Ajudging Freedom.
Today is Tuesday, November 18th, 2025.
My dear friend Colonel Karen Kwetkowski joins us now.
Colonel Karen, thank you very much for your time.
You have a fabulous piece called Breaking the Pentagon about Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth.
Quick draw Pete, as you call him.
But before we get to that, to the breaking news of the moment, the House of Representatives of the United States just voted by a vote of 427 to 1 to order the President of the United States to release the full file, except for names of victims who didn't want their names to be revealed, of Jeffrey Epstein.
What's your take on this Epstein thing?
Do you think that there was the involvement of domestic and foreign intelligence agents with Mr. Epstein?
Oh, yeah.
I don't think there's any doubt about that at this point.
I mean, you know, too many people who understand how intelligence works, I'm not including myself in that, but too many actual intelligence professionals and government watchers have really exposed that story.
I mean, we know what this is.
And actually, you don't have to be an intelligence expert.
You know, he was protected from some parts of the prosecution back in, I guess, 2008 when he faced criminal charges.
He was sheltered and people that knew him were sheltered for national security reasons, which basically lets the whole world know if they're interested that this was a, you know, he is a part of our intelligence and national security.
Now, very interesting what part a pedophile would play.
So that's where we can, you know, go wild with speculation.
But the fact is he worked for our government and our government has protected him.
Well, there's definitely something there.
I don't think there's pictures of Trump doing anything that would damage his presidency.
There's a familiarity with Trump, but there has to be this connection to either protected billionaires or foreign intelligence agents.
I mean, there's so much out there about Epstein and Mossad.
For example, Epstein using the person formerly known as Prince Andrew, I forget what his name is now, Andrew Mountbatten, Windsor, as sort of a useful idiot presenting or informing Epstein of highly sensitive British governmental information, which Epstein then passed on to his Mossad masters.
I mean, that is pretty much well known.
I don't know if there's a crime involved under British law.
I would guess there probably is.
I can't imagine that Andrew had a top security clearance, but yet he gathered this information.
And one wonders exactly what Epstein did with this.
One of the people involved is the former Secretary of the Treasury of the United States, who is also a former president of Harvard University.
The other person involved is a former Israeli prime minister, not the present prime minister, but a former.
And God knows what other people, it's a strange event from a legal perspective.
Just the other day, President Trump ordered the Attorney General to investigate Democrats named by the media as having been involved with Epstein, one of whom was Larry Summers, the former Secretary of the Treasury and president of Harvard.
Well, that raises two issues.
One, the DOJ is absolutely prohibited from commencing investigations based on a person's political preferences.
And two, the DOJ is prohibited from investigating cases where it can't prosecute anybody.
Now, Epstein's been dead for six years and the statute limitations is five.
So where are we going with this?
Yeah.
Well, I've also heard, I don't know if it's true, but if an open investigation that relates to these documents that the Congress has demanded now the president release, if there's an open investigation that involves them, then they are legally protected from having to release them.
Well, if it's a bona fide investigation, but there is no bona fide investigation.
Well, Congressman Massey, who is a longtime friend of mine, told a reporter just the other day he expects impediments, not from Trump, but from someone somewhere along the way preventing this case from coming out.
Because the people involved are either too rich or too powerful to allow their riches or their power to be dissipated as a result of their connections to.
Epstein.
I don't know of anything like this.
Well, this is an open example.
There's that Fat Leonard scandal involving the Navy.
A lot of naval officers were caught up in that bribery scandal, but I've never seen anything quite like, quite as broad and enduring as the Epstein scandal.
Have you?
No, I don't think we have.
But what it does give us is insight into how elite power theory works, you know, elite class theory.
And I watched a guy kind of explain it.
And one of the first things he said about it was, we are seeing the true friendships that exist amongst the elite.
And these are the parties that used and knew and benefited from their Epstein contacts.
That's just one example.
But they're all really friends, Republican, Democrat, left-wing, right-wing.
They're all pals.
And we're getting a little bit of insight into how that all works.
And it's, of course, very disgusting in our country to see this, particularly that it's associated around pedophilia and who knows what else.
But it's also disgusting in America, in our republic, to have the president and others, which I would include in that the Republicans who refused only a few days ago, they would have voted no until Trump allowed them to vote yes because his strategy changed.
You know, this is disgusting in a republic to see this kind of elite power being leveraged on a day-to-day basis in this country.
And we should take that lesson from it.
And again, I mean, obviously, we want justice for the people that were harmed.
And there are many.
There are crimes committed, and there should be some sort of justice for that.
But at the same time, this is a learning opportunity for all Americans.
Many people have already learned some of this, but I think we need the majority to wake up and understand that the elites who run this country truly think that they're better than everybody and truly think they are above the law.
And this is, we're walking, we're watching this play out in the Epstein files drama.
Here's Congressman Massey just yesterday, Chris Cut number 10.
Congressman Massey, is it clear to you why, you know, Kash Patel, Dan Bongino, when they were podcasters, were saying one thing, and then when they got in power and in a position to actually see things and release things with the president's approval, they suddenly were singing a different tune.
Do you know why?
Well, you know, the vice president and the attorney general made the same about face after they got into office.
You know, I have always maintained that it's not because Trump is in these files that he doesn't want them released.
I've thought that he's trying to protect rich and powerful friends of his who may not even be partisan.
They may be above Republican or Democrat because they're billionaires and they figure they can pay off whatever judge or whatever party's in power.
But I wonder why Kash Patel and Dan Bongino had a change of heart.
Maybe, and this is what I believe, it's because it implicates our own intelligence agencies and those abroad.
Maybe they've been in a skiff and they've heard things and they've decided that this wouldn't be good for national security.
But if that's the case, we need to know.
Well, that is really a very powerful argument, powerfully presented by Congressman Massey, and his last sentence is correct, if that's the case.
If there is a national security implication with a guy like this, the public needs to not let the chips fall where they may.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
And I think everybody who watches that and who is following this is in agreement with Massey on this.
And it's smart for the Republicans to have at the last minute decided to, instead of attacking Massey to support his measure that he put forth, he has achieved a huge thing on many facets, really, in getting this vote.
But he's right.
There'll be impediments because the government, our government, and our government's allies who may have been involved in this for years and years and years are not going to simply say, okay, you know, the gig is up.
We'll tell you what we were doing.
They're not going to do that.
So it's a long fight.
Great.
Colonel Korkowski, what does the Pentagon do with a trillion dollars a year?
Well, look, they waste a lot of it, okay?
A lot of it is just poured into the toilet effectively.
You know, every contractor that the Pentagon uses, the big ones and all the subs, you know, this is nothing but additive cost.
It is a profit center without a product, really.
And so a lot of it just disappears into that system.
I mean, you know, you could say, well, they have a lot of people they have to take care of.
I don't know, barracks they have to maintain, but we don't maintain our barracks.
And there's been plenty of news stories about how a lot of our enlisted folks stateside and probably abroad live and are forced to live because they don't make enough to move out of barracks.
They're not allowed to move out of barracks.
And these barracks are really, you know, something that Maha needs to look into and has.
I mean, we know this.
So they don't do the things that you think they do as far as maintaining a defensive capability.
Most of our weapons are not defensive.
They are offensive and they are built to sell, built not to work, but to sell to our allies.
And that's what we do.
And that's what they do.
Well, it takes a lot of money to do that.
And there's a lot of money spent on things that are just always going to be invisible to the average taxpayer.
There's a lot of congressional district kickbacks that go on with every single spending bill and with every month of spending.
This money goes into friendly congressional districts to make things.
What things?
Well, you know, if you had a strategy of defense, someone could answer that question.
But we don't have a strategy of defense.
So the money goes into things that we're not educated on because we're told the Department of Defense.
Now, Trump may have done a great thing by calling it the Department of War, because now we can start thinking about what war costs.
It costs a lot.
But yeah, they waste most of it.
That's my short answer.
Now, if we had a real doge or something to, you know, efficiency, various studies that have gone on periodically in the every decade, it seems like we get a study on how the Pentagon can be more efficient and do, you know, if we actually acted on some of that, then I could tell you.
But we don't act on any of that.
And I'm just going to throw this in here because it's kind of a running joke about 9-11, one of the many strange things that happened that day.
But of course, on September 10th of 2001, the newspaper was revealing massive lost billions and billions of dollars, trillions even.
I think it was billions, but it was a big chunk of change they couldn't put their hands on, didn't know where it went to.
And when the Pentagon was hit or whatever happened there, the actual part of the Pentagon and some of the main people that were killed by this thing, by this event, were located in the very J5 area, you know, Army financial area that they were looking at this stuff.
So very strange, very strange.
We do not hold the Pentagon accountable and we don't have a right to, we really don't have a right to know.
As we pay and they borrow and our grandchildren will pay and pay.
We will not get defense and we don't have the right to know.
That's where we are today.
You're painting a picture of a scam.
Yeah, it's a big scam.
It's a big scam.
When's the last time the Pentagon won a war?
World War II?
Well, yes.
And if you ask Trump, of course, we were the reason that World War II was won.
That's Trump's special view.
If the Soviets hadn't entered and lost 27 million of their people, Europe would be speaking German.
That's right.
But yeah, we haven't had a declared war and we haven't won a war since that time.
I mean, I think they still consider Korea to be in an armistice situation.
Anybody who thinks we won Vietnam, obviously, I don't think there's many people that think that.
So, and there is no one who thinks we won Afghanistan, Iraq, you know, Libya.
I don't know what, I don't know what this is.
We're not even winning.
We're not even winning Ukraine.
And we caused Ukraine.
You know, we built that up as a big thing.
We were going to do that.
And of course, Ukraine is a basket case.
It's getting ready.
I mean, it's pre-collapse.
It's been pre-collapse for a while.
So we've killed Ukraine is what we've done, what Washington has done, what the British have done.
Aren't Americans overwhelmingly, overwhelmingly uninterested in war?
Yeah, and I wrote that, well, we've always seen when we elect a president, if you want to be the president, of course, you have to have elite friends.
But beyond that, you need to have a platform of peace.
And we've seen that over and over and over again.
In my lifetime, not a single president who was more warlike was the one that got elected.
It was always the one who offered peace.
And I always remember being so happy with the platform of George W. Bush because it was non-intervention all the way, just absolutely loved it.
Crazy, wasn't it?
And of course, it wasn't true, but you have to say those things to get elected in this country.
But one thing I noticed, which I had not thought about was MAGA.
Of course, MAGA was put America first.
It was non-intervention, no war, right?
And Trump was very good at expressing that during his campaign, his most recent campaign.
But the other thing is the Democrats who had Trump derangement syndrome, who absolutely despised him for everything, everything that he stood for, everything that he said.
They didn't like the way he looked.
He was orange.
They didn't like him.
But you know what?
Those voters, Democrat voters, Green Party voters, a good many Libertarian voters who voted for the Libertarian candidate instead of Trump.
None of those voters supported war either, which means all the major parties are anti-war, whether you like it or not.
They vote anti-war.
But what do we get?
We get war, war, war, and more war.
And we don't even know if war is going to start in Venezuela.
You know, we've got our ally Japan talking to China as if they're going to defend Taiwan on, you know, with, I guess, we're going to help them.
Crazy things are happening.
And it's all warlike.
It's all, we're putting bases outside of Gaza.
We're putting a we're putting military people in on Damascus military base.
We may have new bases in Central Asia after this new pact that he's doing.
It is really unclear.
We're revamping our South American and Central American bases.
We're saying, hey, can we put some troops back there?
So this is not what anybody wanted.
It's not what MAGA wanted.
And we were told we weren't going to get that.
The MAGA people took a risk.
They said, well, the guy might be telling the truth.
We think he trust him.
But the Democrats, the Greens, the Libertarians, other independents who didn't vote for Trump also did not vote for war.
It's just crazy.
But again, that would, you know, we think we're a democracy.
We think we're a republic.
We're represented.
We are ruled by a constitution.
Well, not in my lifetime.
We haven't been.
Yeah.
Last declared war, 1941.
I want to go back to Epstein because of a statement Congressman Massey has just made.
It's a little troubling because I guess he's getting word that the Senate may tinker with this legislation.
Chris, that is wrong.
Do not let the Senate muck this bill up.
And if you are, if you're a party to that in the Senate, you are part of this cover-up that we are trying to expose.
I am sorry if one of your billionaire donors is going to get embarrassed because he went to Rape Island.
That is what they have coming.
In fact, they need to be on the other side of bars, a lot of them.
Some of them will be embarrassed, but some of them need to go to prison.
And the survivors know that.
So how will we know if this bill has been successful?
We will know when there are men, rich men in handcuffs being perp walked to the jail.
And until then, this is still a cover-up.
Wow.
He referred to it as Rape Island because Epstein had all of these events occurred, or most of them occurred either in his townhouse in Manhattan or this private island that he owned.
It would be really, I think, catastrophic for Trump if his allies in the Senate blocked this.
Wow.
Yeah.
Again, I don't think the elites in this country who run this country and control most of the politicians, I don't think they get the world that they live in.
And I think Massey clearly is speaking to that world.
I mean, I've never heard a more populist message with such passion in a while.
I don't know if I've ever personally seen that.
That is extreme.
I think that's going to go viral, as they say.
You know, putting rich men behind bars, who doesn't want to do that?
I mean, that's all the Democrats.
I mean, the Democrat voters, not the actual Democrats that run the party don't.
I mean, that's the party of Bill Clinton, Bill and Hillary.
They don't want to put rich men behind bars.
Most Americans, especially given the dashing of many of our expectations about the economy, about liberty, about peace, Trump has dashed many of those for us in the past year.
And, you know, inflation's not dealt with.
The costs are going up.
You know, Trump's sending out texts saying there's no inflation.
I mean, Americans want to see rich men behind bars.
And I have to say, I do too.
Well, not because they're rich, but because of what they've done with their riches to insulate them from the consequences of criminal behavior that the rest of us would not be insulated from.
That's right.
It's a double standard.
And that's what Massey's talking about.
And it's also that double standard, this is Trump, Trump won because he said there wouldn't be a double standard.
He was going to speak for the heartland, so to speak.
He was going to represent them.
He knew how it worked.
He knew how the system worked because he used it.
And he was going to be an advocate for the people in that.
And if he loses that high ground, which for half the country, he never had it.
But for the half that supported him, and he loses that high ground, this is dangerous times, really.
People, I don't think the elites that run this country, I don't think they understand how the 99% feel.
This is not a good time to be flouting the wishes of the people, to be flouting bad behavior because you're rich and you can get away with it because you're rich and you own politicians.
And this actually speaks also to the whole anti-APAC movement that's out there.
You know, rich people buying our politicians that we vote for and we expect to be represented by.
But oh, by the way, there's a little factor here that who they're, you know, that has defined and shaped their true loyalties, whether it's to another country like Israel or to other elites who support them.
So yeah, this is an interesting time, interesting time that we're living in.
So Marjorie Taylor Green began this press conference this morning outside the Capitol building with many of Epstein's now adult and grown victims and said, the president called me a traitor.
A traitor is a person who puts another country before theirs.
A patriot is a person who puts their country first.
The president is the traitor.
What country do you think she was talking about, Colonel Kwodkowski?
We know pretty well.
And this is where the bad overlap comes from.
I mean, Israel's in trouble in the United States for a lot of reasons.
Mainly its bad behavior in Gaza, which has been broadcast.
Everybody understands pretty much what's going on there.
But also their manipulation of our politicians, their bold manipulation, open manipulation of our politicians.
So that angers people.
But Epstein, the Epstein circle overlaps with Israel in a lot of different ways.
And Epstein's getting a pass.
Now, Epstein is maybe not, maybe didn't kill himself, but he's not here to defend himself.
And so, but the Epstein operation is getting protected by the government, our government.
And you have to ask the question, why?
Well, is it the same reason that Israel is being protected and allowed to continue their extermination of Palestinians?
Is it the same reason that Israel gets 3.8 plus billion a year and has free health care and subsidies that Americans don't enjoy?
Is that what it is?
Well, guess what?
There's an overlap.
So very, again, The enemy of good of government propaganda is a focused counter narrative.
And I think what we're seeing is a development of a very focused counter narrative.
It's an anti-Israel, anti-Zionist counter-narrative.
And it's also an anti-elite counter-narrative.
And elite billionaires in Israel fit together nicely in Washington in how our policies are made, how our wars are pursued and justified.
So, yeah, big problem.
Big problem.
Before we go, one more from Congressman Massey, mentioning these issues that you just mentioned, Karen, cut number 11.
These files implicate billionaires and friends of his and political donors that he's trying to protect.
And Epstein also had close ties to our own intelligence agencies and Israel's intelligence agencies.
That's why there's so much effort in trying to stop this.
And I do believe they'll try to stop it somewhere else.
And that's going to backfire on them, too.
So the president's saying he'll sign it.
You don't buy that?
No, I think he'll sign it.
I want to be there at the signing party.
Think he'll be invited?
I've never seen somebody not get invited to sign their own bill.
Do you think that President Trump has lost his touch on the Magabees, lost his understanding of the MAGA bees?
I think on aspects of fiscal responsibility, on aspects of starting wars overseas and getting into regime change, and on this case of releasing the Epstein files, I think he has strayed away from the things that he campaigned on.
Very, very gentlemanly, not ad hominem, quite unlike the person who's been attacking him left and right.
So true.
So true.
We are blessed to have Thomas Massey as our, as a congressman.
Absolutely.
And in terms of his understanding of and defense of the Constitution, he's second to none.
He's the latter-day Ron Paul, very close to Congressman Paul's son, Senator Rand Paul, but Thomas Massey is basically in a class by himself.
Karen Kwadkowski, thank you very much.
Always a pleasure, my dear friend.
We'll look forward to seeing you next week.
Absolutely.
Thanks, Judge.
Appreciate it.
Coming up tomorrow, Wednesday, at 8 in the morning, Professor Gilbert Doctorow at 11 in the morning.