Dec. 31, 2025 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
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SCOTT RITTER - Best of Marathon [PART ONE]
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Hi, everyone.
Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
Today is Monday, August 12th, 2024.
Scott Ritter joins us now.
Scott, a pleasure, my dear friend.
Thank you for taking the time to chat with us.
I have many questions to ask you about the latest in Israel and many questions to ask you about the latest in Ukraine and Russia.
But before I do, you had an encounter with the FBI in your home last week.
Can you tell us about it?
Well, I mean, it's more than an encounter.
The FBI executed a search warrant on my home.
We lost count at 30, but we think there might have been close to 40 FBI special agents and auxiliary personnel who paid my home a visit.
Did they tell you they were coming or did they just show up?
No, I just showed up.
Two FBI agents showed up at my door, knocked on it.
I went outside and they said they wanted to talk to me.
I said, about what?
And they said, we have a lot of questions and concerns about your online activity.
And I said, really?
Like what?
And they said, well, it relates to the Foreign Agent Registration Act.
I said, huh, you want to talk about it?
I'm not letting you in my house.
We can sit out here and talk if you want to.
They said, well, actually, we're coming in your house.
And they showed me the search warrant.
And then suddenly the whole area swarms and they brought out a SWAT team in full tactical gear.
And, you know, they're like, we got to clear your house.
And I said, guys, I got four dogs behind the door that are worried.
And you're not opening this door and going in with a SWAT team because you're not shooting my dogs.
And so what's going to happen is put a gun against my head, but I'm going in that house and I'm moving my damn dogs out to the backyard.
Then you can do whatever you want.
I don't care.
And so they were cool.
I mean, look, I have to get to the FBI guys.
They're very calm, very professional, very courteous the entire time, clearly executing orders that they've been given.
And they, you know, the search warrant allowed them to come in and seize my electronic devices.
I mean, it's very specific about what they can and can't do.
You know, so they could seize electronic devices, cell phones, computer storage, electronic, you know, things of that nature.
Clearly focused on electronics.
Knowing the way they are.
They stole everything.
I mean, I'm calling them out right now.
You guys know what you took.
They took gifts that were given to me of a non-electronic nature.
They took documents beyond the ones that they ended up.
They took my entire WMD archive.
You know, when I was a weapons inspector in Iraq, the receipts that allowed me to stare down the United States and all the other liars who were trying to go to war on Iraq based upon their lies about WMDs, you know, it wasn't just my word that helped me prevail.
It was the fact that I had done the job for seven years and I had seven years worth of receipts.
None of it's classified.
All of it is considered sensitive by the United States, but none of it's classified.
You can't give classified information to the United Nations.
But they found that down in my basement and they seized that whole thing, 24 boxes, 80,000 pages.
And I said, you got to give it back, guys.
You can't have this.
And they said, well, we have to review it.
I said, okay, but you have to give it back.
It's not classified.
So they took that, but then they took other things.
They took documents out of my, out of my dresser, out of my, not my dresser, but my, my cabinet here.
They took documents out of my desk.
And like I said, they took gifts, things that weren't electronic in nature.
I don't know what they think they're doing.
I mean, just be honest and put it on the damn receipt, you know, but the receipt doesn't show any of the stuff that's missing.
So it's some sort of stupid game they're playing here, but it is what it is.
They indicated it was about foreign agent, Foreign Agent Registration Act, and two FBI agents spent five hours questioning me.
And I never asked for a lawyer because I haven't committed a crime.
I told that.
I said, just tell me what you're looking for.
You don't have to do this.
Tell me what you're looking for and I'll take you to it.
You know, tell me what you want to know and I'll let you know.
I got nothing to hide here.
But they're concerned, it came down to their concern about my relationship with the Russian government and that somehow I'm taking direction from the Russian government.
They're telling me what to do, what to say.
There's some sort of, and it, you know, but the other thing is, based upon the folders that they had this thick, where they had all of my emails, all of my texts, all of my communications, I said, you guys know everything.
I mean, everything that's going to be your text.
Did they have a search warrant to surveil you that preceded this raid on your house?
They didn't tell me that.
They just showed me the texts that they had printed out.
You know, clearly, oh, they admitted that they'd been monitoring me for years.
I said, how long has this been going on?
They said, well, we've been looking at you for years.
I said, okay, I sort of suspected that.
I don't care.
I have nothing to hide.
And, you know, they, but so what clearly is the problem is that there's a pattern of behavior on my part.
Going to Russia, apparently, is not allowed.
Meeting with the Russian ambassador is not allowed.
It is, of course, there's nothing illegal about it, but under their book, it's not allowed.
And writing articles critical of the United States policy on Russia is not allowed.
And when you put all three of those together in their minds or in the minds of the Department of Justice or somebody who complained to the Department of Justice that they're saying, well, you're an agent of Russia.
And I said, well, what is this specific example?
Show me one thing that you say, this is how we know they couldn't do it.
So it's in my opinion, and people agree with me, that they're looking for covert communications, that they seize my electronics because they believe embedded in my electronics are some sort of covert communications capability that was outside what they did.
Or they took advantage of being in my home and planted bugs throughout the house.
We don't know.
We don't care because I've done nothing wrong.
I mean, it's a pain in it.
I got to watch my language.
It's a pain in the neck to my family.
I mean, this is, you know, it's disconcerting to my wife to have FBI agents show up at her work and start asking her questions.
It's disconcerting to my friends who have FBI agents showing up and asking them questions.
It's disconcerting to my colleagues who have FBI agents.
The whole idea, it's a smear campaign.
Basically, they're creating the impression that I somehow work for the Russian government and therefore what I write and what I say can't be trusted.
And, you know, I respectfully told them that they're wrong.
And I hope they can clarify this.
What we do strongly believe is, first of all, I know they don't have any evidence of me working with the Russian government because I never have worked with or for or on behalf of the Russian government.
So they can't have any evidence of that.
But we know that the U.S. government can convict on circumstantial evidence.
But what's clear is this, and this is what I've told everybody who are telling me to be afraid, be very afraid.
I'm not.
I'll tell you why.
If they had a cognizable case against me, meaning they had enough circumstantial evidence that they could go to a grand jury and get that ham sandwich indicted, they would have done that.
And so, when they showed up with the search warrant, they would have arrested me and led me away in handcuffs, processed me, and prepared the trial.
They didn't do that.
They came to my house, they issued a search warrant.
And normally, in FARA cases, they issue letters of inquiry.
And this is the other thing.
You see, if this was simply, you know, Scott, you may have done something here that we think crossed the line.
They issue a letter of inquiry.
They think I have covert communications.
They think there's something going on that they can't trust me to be honest about.
So that's why they did the raid on the house.
They will find nothing because there is nothing.
But, you know, normally, like I said, a FAIR thing, it's not a crime unless I am unwilling to register.
Well, I can't register because I haven't done anything wrong.
So I'm not going to register.
You're not going to register because you're not a foreign agent.
A foreign agent takes direction from a foreign power.
That's what the statute defines it as.
Yeah, but they interpret direction as me having a conversation.
For instance, if I initiate a conversation with Anatoly Antonov about anything, let's say we're talking about arms control, and then we walk away and people say, well, what did Antonov tell you?
Well, he told me about the negotiating history between him and Rose Gutenmüller and how she lied to him.
And then I write an article about that.
Ah, I took direction from the Russians to write this, smearing America.
I'm like, no, guys, first of all, I'm a journalist.
So get the hell out of my business.
And this is an absolute FBI and the Department of Justice have no right whatsoever to define journalism and journalistic practices.
You know, I have editors at RT.
I am a contributor.
I'm an outside contributing journalist to RT on occasion.
It's not a lot.
And I have editors who receive my material and we have an editorial relationship.
They don't direct me.
Sometimes they correct me.
Sometimes they ask follow-on questions as editors are wont to do.
But that's not direction.
That's not, you know, that doesn't fit the statute.
The Department of Justice is literally out to lunch on this one, out to lunch.
So your beef, of course, is not with the men and women that were in your house, although we know they took far more than the search warrant authorized them.
Your beef is with their bosses in the DOJ, responding probably to political pressure because of what you've said about Israel and about Ukraine and about Russia, started this investigation.
Somebody went to a judge with an affidavit or affidavits.
This is according to the search warrant.
That they went to the judge and they said, you know, in accordance with the affidavits that we have submitted, we have reason to believe that in the house of Scott Ritter is a computer, is a phone, and that if we gain access to the computer and the phone, it will demonstrate this something.
That's the affidavit.
I don't have it because it's a sealed affidavit.
They didn't give it to me and they won't talk to me about it.
But somebody did that.
And here's where I have the problem.
That in order to do that, you have to have you it's beyond simply doing analysis.
This is politically motivated because an analysis of the available facts could never support probable cause.
Somebody had to spin this thing out of control, go wacko and exaggerate and whatever.
Here's why I think you're 100% correct.
Not because you're my friend and I like you when we work together, but because of the facts in this case.
If they were interested only in the content, I'm holding up my iPhone - and the contents of your electronic devices.
They can get that very easily by serving a search warrant or a simple subpoena from a grand jury to the telecom or computer service provider without involving you at all.
It's because they think, since they don't know you, that they can intimidate you by having 40 people show up your house and rip it apart and take what they want.
That's what leads me to believe this is politically motivated and totally misguided.
A, the government is not supposed to interfere with freedom of speech.
B, the government is not allowed to chill the freedom of speech.
C, the government doesn't know Scott Ritter because they would know that he can't be intimidated.
Who do you think pushed this?
Somebody that doesn't like what you're saying about Israel and Hamas or somebody who doesn't like what you're saying about Russia and Ukraine?
I think this is Russia and Ukraine.
I know there's a lot of people out there playing the Israel and Hamas angle, but no, this is driven by the National Security Division, which has a very, look, these are the same people that invented Operation Crossfire Hurricane targeting Donald Trump back in 2016.
Same division.
I just want to point that out.
These are the guys who lied about Michael Flynn.
These are the guys who lied about Donald Trump.
These are the guys who created Christopher Steele and fabricated all that testimony to- Do you think they lied to you?
Because unfortunately, the law is so skewed that the FBI can lie to us.
But if we lie to them, it's a crime.
Do you think they lied to you in the five hours of interrogation?
It's possible.
It's possible.
I'm sorry, I shouldn't read your comments.
Somebody says Scott Ritter is afraid of Israel.
You don't even know me, pal.
I'm not afraid of Israel.
I'll stare them down.
Don't read the comments.
99% of the comments are supportive of what we do on this show, which of course includes you.
So, but no, do I think they lied to me?
I don't think they told me the whole truth, but they were clearly, I have to say, the two agents, there were uncomfortable pauses because the answers I was giving them weren't the answers they wanted or were expecting.
And I kept looking at them and saying, hey, you guys clearly have something on your mind.
You're looking at each other.
Just tell me what it is.
Talk to me.
And then they slowly go in and open up their folders.
And that's when they pulled out the copies of my texts, of my emails that go back two years and all that.
And I said, you guys have been at this a long time.
They went, yeah, we've been following you a long time.
I want to remind everybody the following.
The FBI, the House Judiciary Committee, had a hearing last year where they found earlier this year, where they found that the FBI, through their legal attaché office in Kiev, took instructions from the Ukrainian intelligence service to put pressure on American social media platforms, Twitter, YouTube, others, to shut down accounts that the Ukrainian government found to be offensive,
found to be somehow not propagating the Ukrainian.
So the FBI already has a track record of working on behalf of Ukraine.
I also want to remind your audience that the United States State Department, using taxpayer funds, helped the Ukrainians create something called the Center for Countering Disinformation that works under the auspices of the presidency of Ukraine.
And the first thing they did with the State Department present funding, organizing, and directing is to create a blacklist of Americans who are called information terrorists.
I'm on that list.
I actually topped out in their weekly and monthly concerns for a while.
The most dangerous man in the world to Ukraine was Scott Ritter.
And they also, with State Department people present, are on record saying that information terrorists must be treated as terrorists and arrested.
prosecuted and killed if necessary, Sari, to stop.
And the State Department was there silent.
So what I'm trying to tell you is that the State Department is working with the Ukrainian government to silence American voices, an absolute violation of our constitutional rights.
So when you say who's behind this, I know for a fact that the State Department and the FBI and the CIA have received reams of information from the Ukrainians complaining about my activities, calling me the most dangerous information terrorist in the world today for Ukraine, and that this has to translate into political pressure on people.
So the FARA enforcement unit of the National Security Division of the Department of Justice picked this case up.
They've been following me for two years.
They have nothing, two years, judge, and they have nothing.
They finally were told because I'm apparently getting too much attention here at home.
So they have to smear me.
They have to silence me.
I'll just say two last things.
You'll not find a more patriotic person in America today than me.
There's a lot of patriots out there, and I support them, but I will take a second seat to nobody.
I love this country.
I will die for this country.
And everything I do today is in defense of this country, including, just for the sake of you out there, articulating that America is better off having good relations with Russia, not seeking war with Russia and promoting arms control with Russia.
This isn't because I'm pro-Russian.
I'm not pro-Russian.
I'm pro-American.
And these are all good policies for America.
You can disagree with me, but don't you ever say that what I'm doing isn't supporting the country I love and I'll give my life to.
And the second thing is, who the hell thinks I can be bought?
Do they not know that Paul Wolfowitz in 1998 tried to bribe me with multi-million dollars to lie about Saddam Hussein, invite me into the administration of the future George W. Bush, offer me a job at the Pentagon or the CIA, book contracts, the whole thing.
United States government, or at least those who want to be part of it, have put millions of dollars in front of me if I would lie.
I don't lie.
The truth is my weapon.
It's inconvenient sometimes to people, but the notion that I would work on behalf of the Russian government and tell lies or peddle lies is absurd in the extreme.
And that's the two messages I want to send to the Department of Defense.
You're going after the wrong guy.
I'm more patriotic than you because I give a damn about the Constitution and I can't be bought.
And I'm insulted that you ever thought I could be bought.
You have known for some time that you were on this hit list because you told our audience about it back in June.
Before we get into some substantive things about Russia and Ukraine, were these FBI agents ex-Marines by any chance?
I think there was, again, you asked the question.
I don't know about any of the ones that were there.
I did when they were at the front door and they were saying stuff, I said, I pointed to my doormat, which has a Marine Corps emblem on it.
I said, what the hell part of that background do you think would do any of the things you're alleging?
They went, oh, no, we respect your Marine Corps service.
I said, no, you don't.
You really don't.
But in my house, I mean, behind me, you can't see them, but I have some souvenirs from my time as a weapons inspector in Iraq.
In 1995, I famously or infamously intercepted a load of gyros, a shipment of gyros coming from Russia into Iraq through Jordan.
And I traveled into Jordan covertly, met with the king and his advisor and persuaded them they have to intercept, they have to raid this warehouse tonight or else the gyros will be in Iraq tomorrow.
And they did, and we got all these gyros, but that was just the last shipment.
One shipment had gotten through.
So we had to go to Iraq.
The Iraqis panicked, threw them all into a river, and I brought in divers and we went down there and we got them up.
And so I pulled a bunch of these back to bring them in for evaluation.
And I kept two of them because we used them as retirement gifts and all that.
There's no danger.
They're there.
But the FBI came in and saw them like, what are these?
Explosive devices?
I said, no, they're gyros.
And they brought in a bomb team.
Had to x-ray them.
But the funny thing is, my daughter's fiancé is a welder and he graduated from welding school locally.
And they have different projects.
And one of the projects he did was to make a cube.
And so he welded this cube together.
And then he had some medical issues.
You know, and they put those sticky pads on you for your heart with the little metal nipple that you click the thing on.
And so he came back from his appointment one day and he stuck a couple of these on that cube.
So now it looks like a steel box with electrode leads on it.
Oh, God.
Oh, they were freaking out.
They found this thing and they're like, come down.
The whole SWAT team, not the whole thing.
I'm not lying.
I'm not, I'm exaggerating.
A couple of the SWAT team, but the bomb squad brought them in.
Hi, I'm with the U.S. Army.
They brought me in because they think there's a bomb downstairs.
And I'm like, there ain't no bomb downstairs.
They took me down and they showed it to me.
I said, nah, this is just a welding thing.
But that just shows the level of paranoia that exists when they go through people's homes.
I'm sorry this happened to you.
I believe that you will be exonerated.
It's hard for me to believe that a grand jury would even indict you.
I think the people that, not the people that came to your house, but the people that dispatched them, names currently unknown to you or to the public, are the ones that will have egg on their face.
Switching gears.
Did Ukraine invade Russia at Kurtzk?
Yes, it's an absolute invasion of Russia.
Now, we can have a debate whether or not Ukraine is justified.
I have to tell you, if I were a Ukrainian general, that opportunity presented itself, I'd have to weigh out the long-term risk analysis of that and probably would have said it's not worth it.
But the Russians made a mistake.
As Opti Alodanov, who's a major general in the Russian army at Chechen, who I know very well, has said repeatedly that the Ministry of Defense lied to itself so long that it started to believe its own lies.
And they left an area of Russia undefended.
And the Ukrainians, with NATO assistance, found that weak spot and they came in with the last of their strategic reserves, some of their best units.
And they've enjoyed initial success.
They've run out of steam, Logistically unsupportable, and they're all going to start dying, and they will all die eventually.
But it's been a huge embarrassment for the Russians and a huge distraction for the Russians.
They had to pull troops away that were involved in the Kharkov operation.
They had to bring in reserves that were scheduled to do bigger operations down south.
But what they didn't do is take any forces from the Donetsk area, from the Donbass, where every day they're advancing five, six, ten kilometers.
The Ukrainian defenses are collapsing.
And many in the Ukrainian military are furious because they say, why are you sacrificing 20,000 of our best soldiers in this stupidity for propaganda-only exercise that can only end in one thing, all of them dead, when you could have taken that 20,000 and helped us down here where we're getting our butts kicked on a daily basis?
Was there, is there, with the exception of fomenting this logistical movement of Russian troops around, was there, is there any military purpose or significance to the Ukrainian assault on Kirsk?
Yes.
I mean, look, if they succeeded, if they succeeded in pushing in and capturing territory and then digging in and reinforcing, and the Russians were unable to kick them out, now you have the potential for a territory swap where the Ukrainians say, look, we'll negotiate.
We'll give you back Kirst, but you've got to give us back some of the territory that you took.
And that's a face-saving mechanism for that.
The other one is by attacking.
If you can disrupt, right now, the Russians are virtually broken through in the Donbass.
The Ukrainians don't have any defense left and they're literally just falling back every day in significant distances and there's nothing behind them.
If you could launch an attack that required the Russians to divert resources from the Donetsk operation and therefore slow down or stop that offensive, that's a brilliant strategic victory.
And the thing is, you'll never know how the Russians respond unless you try this.
So they tried it.
And I think, unfortunately, for the Ukrainians, this gambit is going to fail and they're going to lose all of these people and all of that equipment.
I mean, we're talking, this is their best equipment.
This is the M1 tanks, the leopard tanks, the Bradleys, the Strykers, the High Mars, the M777s.
This is their big punch that they've been holding to defend Kiev.
And they committed it to this battle, and it's all going bye-bye.
Here's what President Putin had to say about this earlier today in Moscow, cut number seven.
It seems obvious right now why the Kiev regime refused our proposals to go back to a peaceful resolution.
Also, why they denied any peaceful intermediaries from engaging in this conversation?
The Ukrainian government is following the will of the West and its masters in the West.
It's the West that's fighting us using the hands of the Ukrainians.
They're trying to improve their negotiating positions in the future.
But what negotiations could we even talk about with people who are attacking civilians, civilian infrastructure, or trying to create threats for nuclear industry facilities?
What is there to even talk about with them?
Sounds like he has the same line of thought that you do.
The whole purpose of this was to get an upper hand in negotiating.
But why would we talk to somebody that invades our country and is killing civilians?
It's even worse for the Ukrainians than this because Ukrainians have never been interested in a real negotiation.
Dmitry Medvedev, the former president, former prime minister, currently deputy head of the National Security Council, one of the primary advisors to Vladimir Putin.
He's got a reputation for being somewhat of a hothead who goes out on social media, maybe plays the bad cop to Putin's good cop.
Putin is pretty mad right now.
Look at his face.
That's a face of a stone-cold killer.
And Medvedev basically said that, and Aptiyalodanov, again, the Russian leader, Russian Chechen leader, has said the same thing.
You know, this doesn't end with the recapture of Kursk, that Ukraine is going to be punished.
And this means, frankly, they've lost Sumy, which is the province from where these guys launched.
They're going to lose Kharkov.
They're going to lose Nepetrovs.
They're going to lose Nikolaev.
They're going to lose Odessa.
This was fatal for the future of Ukraine.
The Russians are furious.
And any when Putin says there will be no negotiation, that means this war ends on Russia's terms.
For all the Ukrainians out there who gloat about, oh, we've driven the Russian Navy from Sevastopol.
Well, how?
Because the Ukrainians are in Odessa.
Do you honestly think that Russia will ever come up with a peace agreement that allows Ukraine to remain in Odessa?
No.
Kharkov, you've lost that because you've attacked the Belgrade.
Sumy, you just lost that.
You may lose Kiev too now because the Russians have had it up to here.
So this war, you know, Apti Aladanov continues to believe that the destruction of the Ukrainian army is going on at such a pace that the war ends this year.
But even if it doesn't, this war only ends one way, and that is with the strategic defeat of Ukraine and the strategic defeat of NATO.
And, you know, again, this is NATO committing suicide, political, economic, and military suicide.
Last question on Russia: Is there now pressure from the Medvedevs, the more right-wing persons in the Kremlin on President Putin to be more aggressive in the manner of the war?
Apparently, my dogs think there are.
I don't know if it's the FBI relaunching the raid against the house or something, but somebody's at the door, probably a UPS delivery man.
I think they're there.
I think reality has come in.
Putin had been advising caution.
He's a very pragmatic man.
And I think the reality is that, no, this only ends one way, and that's with the unconditional surrender of Ukraine after the total defeat of Ukraine at the hands of the Russian forces.
How soon do you think we can expect retaliation by Iran for the assassination by the Israeli government of the Hamas leader in Tehran?
If the press reports are being to believe, I'll say this.
I have a colleague, a media colleague who I work with, appear on podcasts with, who's based out of Beirut.
And we were scheduled to do a podcast tomorrow morning.
And this colleague called up and canceled and said, the airplanes are flying over right now.
Things are happening.
We're all going into the bunker.
We're evacuating Beirut.
We think it's happening tonight.
So I think that this is a very real situation.
I think Iran has had plenty of time to prepare a plan.
Hezbollah sort of advertised what's going to happen last night when they launched an attack against Israeli military units in the vicinity of the border, and the Iron Dome just didn't function.
Hezbollah hacked it or somehow disabled it.
But this is the reality of Israeli air defense is it's not going to function.
Some estimates show that Iran may launch 1,500 missiles at the same time.
That will overwhelm everything that Israel and the United States has.
This is a very dangerous situation for Israel because if Iran succeeds, this is the physical destruction of Israel.
This means now that this is a dangerous situation for the region because Israel has nuclear weapons.
And if the physical destruction of Israel is such that Israel feels its existential survival is at stake, then the so-called Samson option could be kicked in where Israel uses nuclear weapons to ensure that nobody survives Israel's demise.
Hezbollah is ready to go on the offensive in the Galilee.
That's the other thing I've been warning people about.
If you think this fight's just going to be a missile fight, you don't know Hezbollah.
It's not going to be a fight in southern Lebanon.
It's not going to be a fight in Beirut.
It's going to be a fight in Haifa.
It's going to be a fight in the Galilee.
Hezbollah is going to be inside Israel in considerable numbers, 20,000, 30,000 men who are going to be slaughtering the Israelis, taking over Israeli towns and villages, maybe cutting off Haifa.
Who knows how far they'll go?
This is going to be a war, if it happens, unlike anything anybody's ever experienced, and it will be devastating for Israel, for the people of Lebanon, for the people of Iran, because Israel still packs the capability to launch retaliated strikes.
Will Netanyahu get what he wants if what he wants is a war between the United States and Iran?
There won't be a war between the United States and Iran.
The United States has made that clear.
The United States is there to defend Israel, but the United States will not carry out offensive operations against Iran.
You know, the United States knows what the consequences will be.
We have American forces in Iraq, in Syria, in Ghadr, in Kuwait, in Bahrain, who are extremely vulnerable to Iranian attack.
We have no defenses against these attacks.
And the Iranians have said, we don't mind if you defend Israel, but if you attack us, we take it all out.
We're in the middle of an election.
And this Israeli conflict is not as popular as American politicians would like it to be.
And to get America dragged down in a war where we lose hundreds, if not thousands of Americans instantly, when we have aircraft carriers sinking, when we have ships sinking, and then politicians have to say, how did this happen?
Yes, America will rally around the flag, of course, and yes, we'll go to war.
But why did this war have to happen?
Did we have to lose this many people?
Did we have to lose all of this equipment?
And why now in the midst of an economic, you know, when we have economic difficulty, are we spending trillions of dollars in a war that didn't have to be fought?
No presidential candidate wants to be dealing with those issues.
So I don't believe we're going to be getting involved in a war with Iran.
I do think we're going to be embarrassed when the Iranians break through our missile defense shield and bring about a lot of death and destruction on Israel.
But we'll see.
We'll see what happens.
I do want to show you a clip from one of your two clips from one of your least favorite people.
Not Lindsey Graham, Senator Tom Cotton.
Chris, run one and two, back to back.
Israel has to strike on occasion at places like hospitals and schools because Hamas uses them for command and control or to fire mortars and rockets.
There are civilian casualties in Gaza, no doubt, but those are solely the responsibility of Hamas, not Israel.
She refused to preside over the joint session, her only constitutional duty as president of the Senate.
She refused to have a meeting in public with them.
And she came out and again blamed Israel for the civilian casualties in Gaza, only emboldening Iran and Iranian-backed terrorists.
And what did you have?
Two days later, Hezbollah, another Iranian-backed terrorist, shot in rockets to Israel and blew up children playing ball at a playground.
Kamala Harris is naive and she's not prepared to be the commander-in-chief.
God, talk about naive.
Tom Cotton is a, I mean, served in the military.
He left a law career to go serve.
He served in an airborne unit in Iraq, so had the potential of, but Tom Cotton needs to know this.
And Tom, if you're listening, listen carefully.
If you were on active duty and you executed any of the instructions that you've just said Israel can do, you would be arrested and prosecuted as a war criminal, stripped of everything and put in jail for the rest of your life.
And you know that, you scum.
And how dare you sit there and hide behind the title of United States Senator, trying to moralize that what Israel's doing is somehow justifiable.
If America's not allowed to do it, Israel's not allowed to do it, because that's what international law and the law of war says.
Tom Cotton is the most ignorant person out there besides Lindsey Graham, my other favorite senator.
But I mean, this was literally the embodiment of ignorance, stupidity, and absolute a vacuum of morality.
This man has no moral compass.
If he can sit there with a straight face and say that Israel has a right to bomb schools and bomb hospitals, America doesn't have that right, pal.
Why?
Because it's the wrong thing to do.
And you're an American who took an oath to uphold and defend the Constitution, and you know better.
You're encouraging Israel to commit war crimes that you would not be allowed to commit if you are on active duty.
Hypocrite in the extreme.
I have to say at the end of this long but gratifying session that our dear friend Ray McGovern is correct when he called you the personification of personal courage.
I might take it one step farther and say you are the incarnation of personal courage in a free society.
God bless you, Scott.
Stay the way you are.
Thank you for being a friend of the show.
Thank you for being my friend.
And thank you for being so wedded to the truth, come what may.
Thanks for having me.
Of course.
We'll see you again soon.
Wow.
And we have a full day coming up for you tomorrow.
Bear with me for just a second as I get these, get the schedule out for you.
At eight o'clock tomorrow morning, Pepe Escobar, you won't believe the new alliance between China and Palestine.
At 12 noon, Professor Lawrence Wilkerson.
At 2 in the afternoon, Matt Ho.
At 3 in the afternoon, Colonel Karen Kwatkowski.
At 5 in the afternoon, worth waiting for Professor Jeffrey Sachs.
My hat is off to Scott Ritter.
He is truly a great man, and I am privileged to be his friend.
Justin Napolitano for judging freedom.
Scott Ritter, welcome here, my dear friend.
Before we get to Genocide in Gaza and what can be done to stop it.
Were you surprised at all that there were no Israeli officials at the funeral of Pope Francis?
I wasn't surprised.
I mean, Israel, as it's currently configured, is governed by a criminal enterprise, genocidal in nature, who cannot sustain themselves based upon the quality of the argument used to justify their continued existence.
And as a result, when people are critical of them, when people call them out for their crimes, they tend to attack and isolate, condemn, belittle.
And so here we have a man who is at the head of the Catholic Church, a very influential man, a man of peace, and who, you know, even if you disagree with the tactics he's used or wish he said things better, the potential for the Catholic Church to weigh in on an issue and have a meaningful impact.
When I say meaningful, one that contributes to peace is huge.
And here we are, we have the Israelis ignoring them, isolating and belittling them, condemning them.
It reflects poorly on the state of Israel.
But hey, it's a genocidal state.
Everything reflects poorly on them.
How deep are the domestic divisions?
It appears that this dispute between Nets and Yahoo and Ronan Barr, the head of Shinbet, roughly their NSA or their FBI, is getting quite serious.
Look, when we speak of Israel, understand that even before October 7th, the Israeli president said that Israel was on the cusp of a civil war.
That's a shooting war.
That's not civil disobedience, civil unrest demonstrations.
That's Israeli with a gun shooting at an Israeli with a gun.
The nation was fundamentally divided because of Benjamin Netanyahu.
This is not a wildly popular guy.
He has sustained his hold on power only because he creates an environment of conflict where he should have taken the path towards peace.
For instance, all of the hostages could have been home today had Benjamin Netanyahu truly wanted peace.
But peace means that now Benjamin Netanyahu has to be held accountable to the Israeli courts.
He is a corrupt man.
He's been charged with corruption, but now there's new charges.
He has violated several laws pertaining to the national security of Israel.
And Shinbet, as you said, is the FBI.
They're responsible for enforcing those laws.
And Netanyahu is in their sights because he is a criminal.
It's not just the crimes he's committed against humanity.
He has violated Israeli law left and right.
And so he now, again, has to double down on conflict to sustain his hold on power.
Meanwhile, he continues to exacerbate the divides that existed before October 7th.
Israel is a broken nation.
There is a real chance that Israel will devolve into some sort of civil conflict, if not an outright civil war.
Yair Lapid, who is the leader of the opposition in the Knesset, says that he foresees, you cited this, but you were talking about Herzog.
He foresees, regrettably, Jews killing Jews in the near future.
He must be talking about the same thing that the president of Israel was talking about, whom you quoted a few minutes ago.
I believe he is.
And again, I take this back.
From 1994, 1998, I spent four years traveling back and forth to Israel doing liaison with their intelligence services.
And one of the guys that I worked with was a colonel who was responsible for the strategic assessments of Israel.
And I watched as Iraq dropped from number one to about number six or number eight on the list and was amazed at what replaced it because I thought it would have been Iran or Hamas, Hezbollah, something like that.
The number one threat in 1998 to the state of Israel, projecting forward, were ultra-Orthodox Jews, right-wing extremists who didn't share the vision of Israelis who had been born in Israel, who understood the necessity, the need of having peaceful relations with the Palestinians.
These were fanatics who had a vision of a greater Israel, had no sympathy or empathy for the Palestinian people, and were willing to use violence to achieve their means.
Yitzhak Rabin was killed by one of these right-wing extremists.
The assassin who killed the prime minister of Israel wasn't Hamas, wasn't Hezbollah.
He was a Jew, a right-wing Jew who had received instructions from a Metalmudic rabbi who declared Yitzhak Rabin to be some sort of defiler of Judaism, therefore able to be murdered as if God ordained it.
Netanyahu heard the rabbi say this at a rally and did nothing to interfere.
No, the greatest threat to Israel isn't Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran.
The greatest threat to Israel is Israel.
What became of the guy that murdered Rabin?
He's still in jail.
Do the Israelis recognize that Netanyahu is a murderer?
The Israelis who are level-headed, the Israelis who are looking for peaceful outcomes, the Israelis who are tired of this war.
Yes, of course they recognize this.
But Netanyahu is the vehicle that empowered this right-wing fanatic element, this greater Israel element, to the ultra-Zionists, to the greater Israeli host, to the people who have embraced the Talmud over the Torah, to the people who speak of Amalek as if it's a good thing to slaughter human animals.
Netanyahu is their savior.
He is the man who has empowered them in a way that no other Israeli leader has done in the history of Israel.
And so, again, Israel is fundamentally divided over this fundamentally corrupt man.
Let's come over to the United States for just a minute.
The drumbeat to drive Pete Hegseth from his position as Secretary of Defense.
Who or what is behind it?
First of all, he wasn't a popular choice amongst the establishment.
And when I say establishment, I don't just mean the deep state.
I mean what you would expect, normal people, people who have put in the time, got their stars, three stars, four stars, people who have headed industry, people who have made decisions at the national level, people who care deeply about this country, viewed Pete Hegseth as a threat because he was an upstart with literally no relevant experience.
He has no qualifications to be Secretary of Defense, none whatsoever, except that Donald Trump likes him.
But that's not, that shouldn't be the qualification.
As I've said before, Hegseth is at best a battalion operations officer, maybe a battalion commander, although I question sometimes his actual leadership skill set.
There are many people who are anti-Hegseth.
Having said that, once he becomes the Secretary of Defense, the buck stops there.
He is the man, and you have to support him.
I mean, that, you know, the time to oppose Pete Kagseth was before confirmation.
That's when you go to Congress and you say he's not qualified, et cetera.
But once the Senate confirms him, he becomes the Secretary of Defense, raises his hand, takes the oath, he's the man.
He's the boss.
He's the guy and he has to be supported.
Unfortunately, we have people who believe that their personal prejudices, their personal feelings are more important than the national security of the United States of America.
For better or worse, Pete Kegseth is the lawfully ordained Secretary of Defense of the United States of America.
And unless the President of the United States loses confidence in him or he does something that is so egregious it compels him to resign, until that happens, or if that never happens, he's the guy.
He's the Secretary of Defense, and he must be treated as such.
There are people out there who are trying to undermine him, who believe that they have the right to dictate outcomes that the American people don't support.
The American people voted for this president, and this president picked Pete Kagseth, and the Senate, again, elected by the American people, confirmed him.
Pete Kagseth is the choice of the American people.
And we have people out there that don't respect democracy enough, I guess, to allow that to happen.
Some of our colleagues on the show believe the drumbeat is orchestrated by neocons because apparently he has encouraged President Trump to exercise a restraint with respect to bombing Iran.
And they're looking to induce the president to replace someone more like-minded to them, to the neocons.
The neocons have always been a problem.
Remember, these are the people that gave us John Bolton, Mike Pompeo and Nikki Haley, all the people that caused Trump so much problems in his first administration.
The American people didn't elect the neocons.
The neocons are, you know, the near-do-well remnants of a former time.
The bottom line is this president doesn't want to go to war against Iran.
This president is trying to maneuver towards peace.
And thank goodness he has a Secretary of Defense who respects the president's wishes.
You know, Pete Kegseth will obey his orders.
I'm sure he's been told prepare for potential military operations against Iran.
And the U.S. military is prepared to do that.
But when it comes time to advise the president of the United States, I think Hegsteth wisely says this is a war we're not positioned to win decisively, if at all.
This is a war that will undermine everything you've directed us to try to achieve in terms of stability, peace, etc.
This is a war the nation is not prepared to fight.
Mr. President, I would advise against going to this war.
This is what a good Secretary of Defense would do.
And it's what the president wants.
You know, the president doesn't need people trying to undermine him, trying to reverse his strategic thinking.
This president does not want a war with Iran.
Respect that.
Unless an intelligence shows up that says Iran has done something worthy of war, you don't go to war because the neocons want it.
You don't go to war because Netanyahu wants it.
You go to war because the security of the United States is at risk.
And right now it's not at risk.
Why are we paying to slaughter Gazans?
Because Netanyahu wants it and because the American establishment, the American government is controlled by the donor class.
With all due respect, Judge, it's not Netanyahu who wants it.
This has been happening for decades.
This isn't something that was invented by Netanyahu.
It wasn't invented by Trump.
It wasn't invented by Biden.
It wasn't invented by Obama.
It wasn't invented by Bush.
It wasn't invented by Clinton.
Wasn't invented by the first Bush, by Reagan, by Ford, by Nixon.
This is a problem that goes way back.
This is collective failure that accumulates over the years.
This isn't about people waking up today saying, we're going to transform Gaza into a conflict zone.
We know that the Israelis, Netanyahu, are the worst possible ilk of Zionism.
We know that they don't want there to be a Palestinian state.
We also know that the Trump administration, in a misguided effort to achieve peace and stability in the Middle East, brought in something called the Abrahams Accords in their first term, which even though proclaimed support for a Palestinian state, really sought to undermine the very possibility of a Palestinian state.
We know that neither one of these parties, Trump or Netanyahu, have a plan for peace, a viable plan for peace, and that their policies lead to death and destruction.
But they didn't invent that, Judge.
That's been around for decades.
What conceivable advantage is there to the United States paying for this slaughter of Gazans?
Oh, I don't know.
Let's see, the people, Congress authorizes the expenditure of money.
Last time I checked, Congress was voted into office by the American people.
And last time I checked, the pro-Israeli lobby had an iron kung fu grip on the American electoral process.
They spent $100 million to win the Congress this last election.
Not a single one of those investigated as being an agent of a foreign nation, even though they all are.
But what incentive to stay in office, to stay in power?
None of these people voting for this truly believe in Israel.
The fact is, I've spoken to them.
They are ignorant as the day is long about Israel.
Many of them who support only support because of some perverted form of Christianity that says that we have to support the state of Israel so that end of days comes Armageddon and we can all die.
That's not really the people I want to be leading my country.
If you believe that it is our fate to accelerate God's will to die in a nuclear holocaust, maybe you shouldn't be in office.
But these are the people that are in office, and they use the Israeli lobby to help keep themselves in office.
This is what's going on.
This isn't about the national security of the United States.
This isn't about doing the right thing by Israel.
In fact, we're doing the wrong thing by Israel because our support is actually undermining the legitimacy of Israel in the long term.
It could possibly lead to not the elimination of a Palestinian state, but the elimination of an Israeli state.
So we're not doing this for Israel.
We're not doing it for our national security.
We're doing it because a bunch of cowards in Congress have been intimidated by a pro-Israeli lobby.
Multiple administrations don't have the courage to call a foreign agent, and they let them buy Congress, control Congress.
That's why we're doing it, because we have power-hungry narcissists who want to stay in power.
This is the other side of Pete Hegset, who refers to himself as a super Zionist.
How can the slaughter in Gaza be stopped?
Well, I can tell you how it won't be stopped, and it won't be stopped by continuing doing what we're doing.
For all the people out there who are saying, you know, we need to protest in the streets.
I admire these protesters.
I mean, God bless you, you're out there doing the thing.
You haven't saved a single Palestinian life.
For all the people who think that by calling Israel names and speaking out against Israel, and I've been guilty of this, that we're somehow promoting things, we haven't saved any lives.
We've only furthered this conflict.
I did believe at one time during the 15 months of Hamas's resistance that Hamas, combined with Hezbollah and Iran, could prevail militarily that accelerated the collapse of Israel.
They almost pulled it off, but in the end, the Pagers went off.
Nasrallah was killed.
Syria fell.
And the chance for a decisive military defeat of Israel evaporated.
So now I look in the mirror and say, well, what do I need to do?
Do I need to continue what I've done in the past, knowing that now there is no mechanism in place and there won't be for some time to bring about the military defeat of Israel?
Do I criticize the supporters of Israel?
And the answer is no.
The only way out of here is going to be through negotiations.
The only way out of here is going to be through compromise.
And that can only happen if we stop throwing rocks at one another and learn to sit down with one another, even if we may disagree with everything this person said and we may be revolted by the positions he or her has taken.
We have to start talking with them.
We have to have dialogue to begin a process that changes the paradigm because the current paradigm only leads to dead Palestinians in Gaza.
We need to change that paradigm so that we're talking about the cessation of hostilities and the potential of the creation of a two-state solution.
Are we close to a regional war in the Middle East?
Oh, we're hair breadths away from it.
But the good news is that despite all of the pressure that's being placed on the different parties to promote the potential of conflict, we have a president of the United States that doesn't want a larger war.
Be critical of Donald Trump all you want to, but at least appreciate the fact that this man sincerely does not want a war.
He has all the excuses necessary to go to war against Iran.
But he recognizes how devastating that will be for the region, for the world, for America.
And he's doing the right thing by saying, no, we're going to pick a different path.
We're going to talk.
We're going to negotiate.
We're going to have that dialogue.
And as long as the president's willing to send representatives to sit down with Iranians, as long as the Iranians are willing to send representatives to sit down with the president's representatives, we have a real chance of avoiding a conflict.
But the second you stop talking, the second you stop that dialogue, conflict becomes almost inevitable.
Why is he killing civilians in Yemen?
Well, the answer to that one's easy because they're interdicting international shipping lanes in the Red Sea.
Civilians.
Civilians dying everywhere.
Bombing apartment buildings in Yemen.
The same president who said, stop, Vladimir, stop killing civilians in Kyiv is bombing civilians in Yemen.
Consistency has never been the strong suit of any American president.
So, you know, to expect Donald Trump suddenly to become consistent.
You know, we killed 60,000 French civilians to liberate Normandy.
We expected to kill 80 to 100,000 of them, but we slaughtered 60,000 of them, Judge.
We flattened villages.
We flattened cities.
We flattened farms.
That's what war does.
The normal ratio in war is about a one-to-one ratio.
For every combatant killed, you kill a civilian.
We don't know how many Yemeni people, soldiers, combatants we've killed.
The Yemeni are rightly tightly lipped on that.
They will broadcast every time a bomb hits a target.
And I will tell you right now, I'm not supporting this conflict in Yemen.
I believe this is stupid.
I believe that we should be looking for alternatives.
But if you're going to bomb, this is what happens when you run out of targets.
This is what happens when you start doing something.
We did this during the Gulf War, Judge.
We were going after Iraqi scud missiles and we just ran out of targets.
So we started blowing up Bedouin tents.
We started blowing up trucks, buses, automobiles.
You name it.
We bombed it because we were desperately looking for something.
This isn't unique to Yemen.
This is what we did in Vietnam.
This is what we wanted to do.
Seth is telling the president, do you know that we're killing civilians?
Because supposedly this president is appalled at that.
I don't think the military is going to come out and say, oh, we're killing civilians.
during the Gulf War, we said, well, we believe that that was a mobile scud missile, even though it was a Bedouin tent full of a Bedouin family.
We never came out and said, oh my God, we killed veterans.
We just said it was a suspected scud missile.
And then, and that's it.
That's just the way the military operates.
I'm not justifying it.
I'm just saying it is what it is.
But I'm opposed to the conflict in Yemen.
We shouldn't be bombing.
But the fact that we're killing civilians, every time we put aircraft in the air and drop bombs on our target, we kill.
So we killed civilians when we bombed Belgrade.
We killed civilians when we bombed Mosul, Baghdad.
Every time we drop bombs, we kill civilians.
That's just the horrible reality of war.
If you don't want to kill civilians, don't go to war.
Tell me about the highway to hell.
The highway to hell is the name of a book that I've got out right now.
And basically, hell is a nuclear conflict, and we are on the highway to hell.
I stole it from ACDC, but basically, it's a book that tracks my thinking on the danger of nuclear war, the danger of the threat of nuclear proliferation, arms races, the need for arms control from 2015 up until today.
I've been calling this threat out consistently over time.
And so I brought together my thinking over the course of nearly a decade into a single volume, Highway to Hell, so that people can take that path, get on the highway.
And by the time you get to the end of it, to the end of the book, you'll realize how close we are to having everything we love and dear in this world come to an end.
What will trigger a regional war in the Middle East?
Will it be the Israelis bombing Iran, notwithstanding Trump saying no and then coming to us for assistance?
What do you think will be the spark that ignites this?
I would be surprised if Israel did a unilateral attack on Iran because Israel doesn't have the military capacity to neutralize Iran.
And so what would happen is Iran would immediately fire thousands of missiles into Israel and take Israel off the map.
Israel won't attack Iran, even though Netanyahu is making suggestions otherwise.
They won't attack Iran without America being there with them.
Remember, everybody likes to flex their muscles and pretend they can go without America.
Remember the British and the French, we're going to put troops on the ground.
But when America said we're not backing you up, they went, well, I guess we're not putting troops on the ground in Ukraine because nobody can do anything without us.
Israel can't attack Iran without us.
And right now, we're not going to be helping Israel.
But there's other things that Israel can do.
They have a history of assassinating Israeli or Iranian nuclear scientists.
They have a history of carrying out covert actions, destructive covert action that destroys nuclear facilities.
They assassinate leaders in the Iranian capital.
There's a good chance that the missile fuel that blew up in Bandur Abbas was an Israeli covert action.
And if you carry out enough of these covert actions, the Iranians may decide that they're going to respond anyways.
And then if Iran attacks Israel, then America might get involved and then this thing spins out of control.
Scotty, good luck on the sale of the book.
I have read it.
I endorsed it.
I have a blurb in there from me, and I wholeheartedly endorse it, not just because you're my friend, but because people need to understand what's coming and hopefully avoid it and how close we are to the end of times.
But thank you, my dear friend.
Thanks for accommodating my schedule.
Thanks for taking all my questions today.
Well, thanks for having me.
Always a pleasure.
All the best.
And coming up tomorrow at 8 in the morning, Ambassador Charles Freeman at 2 in the afternoon.
Colonel Douglas McGregor at 3 in the afternoon.
Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski at four in the afternoon from Moscow, Professor Jeffrey Sachs, Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom.
Scotty, welcome here, my dear friend.
As we are taping this, it's lunchtime on Monday, July 7th, 2025.
Before we get to Ukraine and the collapse, I want to talk about what's happening in Washington.
Benjamin Netanyahu and his Mossad colleagues are having lunch in the White House with President Trump.
What do you think they're telling him?
I don't know what they're telling him.
I am more concerned about what the president's trying to sell them.
You know, the president's looking for a grand compromise on Gaza.
He has plans to bring the conflict to an end, and he is trying to get the Israelis to transition into a permanent cessation of hostilities.
He's trying to sell the Israelis on the Abrams Accords 2.0, a vision where a Middle East led by an Israeli economic energy hub brings peace and prosperity to all involved so long as Israel's at the head of this arrangement.
Netanyahu is going to be talking about the need for continued violence, continued war, that Israel can't truly be safe until all of Israel's enemies are destroyed.
And so we see Israel trying to lurch down a path of continued war, continued violence, and Donald Trump trying to find an off-ramp from this, but one that legitimizes Israeli supremacy.
Basically, what I see is two men have bought into fantasies that are so devoid of reality, it's not even funny.
Trump hasn't explained how he's going to make the Iranian problem go away.
And Israel hasn't explained how they're going to defeat Hamas.
I just want to remind people over the course of the past several days, Hamas has carried out several very bloody attacks against Israeli soldiers in Gaza at the time when the Houdi of Yemen have once again resumed military operations that have resulted in a ship sunk in the Red Sea that was heading toward Israel.
And three Houdi missiles not being intercepted, hitting targets, and Houdi drones hitting targets.
If people thought that the day of Israelis running to air raid shelters was over, think again.
And so, you know, I just see these two men living in fictional worlds in their own brains that operate outside of the harsh reality of the Middle East, a reality defined by continued Hamas resistance and continued Iranian intransigence when it comes to bending the knee to Donald Trump's insistence that they get rid of their nuclear program in totality.
Isn't it also defined by a continued American finance of genocide in Gaza?
Not just finance, Judge.
I mean, money is money.
I mean, we can't live without it.
And we all know that's a reality.
But more important than money is integrity, values, honor.
And this genocide that's going on isn't just funded by the United States, but facilitated by American complicity in what Israel is doing.
Israel is simply murdering Palestinian children and Palestinian civilians every day, a scale that has numbed most observers, including myself.
I mean, you know, my heart goes out to everybody killed, but day after day after day, we get the Israelis bombing schools, bombing refugee camps, bombing humanitarian disbursement centers.
We have Israeli soldiers confessing their crimes on TV that basically they've turned Gaza into a free fire zone where the rule of law doesn't apply, where commanders, local commanders get to decide who lives and who dies, and they always decide against the Palestinian victim of these Israeli crimes.
So this isn't just America financing it.
This is America condoning it.
And I just want to remind people that it is American security contractors that are on the scene shooting Palestinian civilians as they try to receive the humanitarian aid they absolutely have to have access to to survive.
I want to ask your audience, what would you do if your daughter, if your sons were starving to death and there was aid being dispersed over there?
Would you not seek to go and get the food that your family desperately needs?
If you did do that, American contractors over the horizon would tear grass you and shoot you.
And if they didn't kill you, then Israeli bombs would.
That's what's going on in Gaza today.
Why are American contractors there?
And what are they doing there?
And why are they killing Palestinians?
American contractors are there because the United States, the Trump administration, was seeking to impose an American footprint on Gaza, part of his solution to the problem.
Why are they killing?
Because the people who tend to be contractors, and I challenge them, I'm not shy about this.
You're a mercenary.
You're taking money to kill people.
You're not there to serve the United States.
You're there to serve a contract.
And the contract implies some sort of security base.
Now, that's one thing if an American contractor was compelled to fire around in a very dangerous situation.
But video has come out showing them cheering each other on as they shoot, hey, I think you got one.
All right.
Hooray, that way to go, guys.
These are murderous scum.
These are the worst kind of people.
These are people who shouldn't be allowed to carry a gun.
And yet they're there in a zone shooting Palestinians as they try to gain access to the food they desperately need.
And these Americans are cheering this.
They think this is a good thing.
When you recruit from a pool of psychopaths who have behaved abysmally abroad, whether they wore the American uniform or they were there in other contract scenarios, this is what you get.
I mean, this is disgusting, Judge.
And yet they're above the law.
I hope that one day they're held accountable for the crimes that they are committing because they're not serving the American people.
They're serving Israel.
And this is Donald Trump allowing Americans to be further corrupted in the name of Israel.
I want to play a clip that I know you and I have seen because we watched it, but it's appropriate.
While Netanyahu is having lunch with Trump, it's Tucker Carlson decimating Ted Cruz on the obligation Senator Cruz believes he has the command from God to support the government of Benjamin Netanyahu.
Growing up in Sunday school, I was taught from the Bible, those who bless Israel will be blessed, and those who curse Israel will be cursed.
So that's in the Bible.
As a Christian, I believe that.
Where is that?
I can find it to you.
I don't have the scripture off the tip of my news.
It's in Genesis.
Where does my support for Israel come from?
Number one, because biblically we're commanded to support Israel.
But number two, hold on.
You're a senator.
We are commanded to support Israel.
And what does that mean?
We're told those who bless Israel will be blessed.
But hold on, define Israel.
This is important.
Are you kidding?
This is a majority Christian country.
Define Israel.
Do you not know what Israel is?
He's talking about the nation of Israel.
Yeah, nations exist, and he's discussing a nation.
A nation was the people of Israel.
He's the nation.
The Senate referring to in Genesis, is that the same as the country run by Benjamin Netanyahu right now?
Yes.
Yes, it is.
How prevalent and dangerous is this attitude in the United States?
What a ridiculous display that was put on.
What an embarrassing display.
I want to remind Ted Cruz that when the Declaration of Independence, we just celebrated the 4th of July, when it was signed, there was no Netanyahu run state of Israel, and the Founding Fathers didn't speak about subordinating the will of America to some fictional entity.
At that time, the Ottoman Empire occupied the land, and there was no talk about Israel or creating the state of Israel.
When the Constitution of the United States of America was written, there was no talk about Israel.
When the United States fought its civil war to define, further define who we are, there was no talk of the state of Israel.
The state of Israel is a modern fiction imposed on the world by the British or the Balfour Declaration, by the Rothschilds who have bragged about creating the state of Israel.
And Ted Cruz is an embarrassment as an American.
No.
Well, I'm sorry.
I joined the Congress of the United States to serve Israel, to support Israel.
I have to speak out against Dan Bon Gino, who said, you know, my top priority is the security of Israel.
Kash Patel, the FBI director, my top priority is the security of Israel.
No, if your top priority is the security of Israel, get the hell out of American government.
When you serve the American people, you take an oath to the Constitution of the United States of America, and your number one priority is the American people, not the Israeli people.
Ted Cruz is the epitome of what is wrong in Washington, D.C. today, what is wrong in America today, where we have forgotten who we're supposed to work for.
Hey, Ted, there is no state-sponsored church here in America, and your Christian beliefs don't trump the Constitution, and they don't trump your duty to the American people.
And if you truly believe what you told Tucker Carlson, then you must resign.
And if the citizens of Texas are going to allow their senator to posture in this manner in a way where he specifically says he will subordinate the interests of the United States, he will allow America to be put in harm's way to defend the Israeli people, then the people of Texas have to vote him out of office.
No, Ted Cruz, you're the most un-American person I can imagine.
You don't serve America.
You're not serving your constituents.
You're serving the state of Israel.
And that's a problem with me.
You recently referred on this program to, I'm switching gears now, Scott, Ukraine as being in hospice.
And by the way, our mutual friend Rick Sanchez on RT today quoted you with glee for having said that.
When Ukraine collapses, what will the neocons seize upon next?
It depends on the nature of the collapse.
I mean, you know, will it collapse in a way that, you know, causes Europe to follow through with many of these promises they've made.
I mean, if you just saw, you know, Mark Rutte, the Secretary General of NATO, giving just a horrifically embarrassing presentation where, you know, he basically says that, you know, if NATO doesn't stand up to Russia, then all Europeans need to learn how to speak Russian.
You know, he acknowledges the absolute failure on the part of NATO over the course of the past decades to build anything that remotely resembles a viable defense industry.
And now recognizing that the only way that he's going to hold this artificial edifice called the European Union together is by promoting the continued need for NATO.
But to have a continued need for NATO, you need a threat.
And that threat now is being articulated as Russia.
He is saying that they need to bankrupt themselves morally and fiscally in order to continue to promote this notion of NATO.
So if the neocons are successful in getting Trump to attach himselves to NATO, then the collapse of Ukraine will simply be the vehicle upon which they will continue to pour untoward billions of dollars into sustaining this train wreck known as NATO.
If Trump can distance himself from this, then the collapse of Ukraine could be used as a trigger for a collapse of NATO.
And NATO needs to collapse.
People need to understand that.
Stop saying that we need NATO.
We don't need NATO.
There's no reason for NATO to exist.
NATO's excuse for legitimacy ended with the collapse of the former Soviet Union.
Russia does not pose a threat to either NATO or Europe.
russia simply wants to exist and survive in a world where nato in the united states um you know have been using i've been trying to defeat russia put their foot on the throat of russia Russia refuses to die as any sovereign nation would.
But no, it depends on how the Trump administration attaches itself to Europe as Ukraine collapses and the SS NATO sinks.
Well, I couldn't agree more with what you said.
I just wonder if the people of Europe go to bed at night worrying about a Russian invasion, because I think this is just a fiction concocted by Mertz and Starmer and Macron and Ruta.
Ruta even said he expected the war in Ukraine to go on for another five years.
He's out of his mind.
Well, you know, sometimes hospice patients don't go gently into that good night, and they hold on for some time now.
But the bottom line is Ukraine will die.
And then you can decide as a sovereign entity whether or not you want to bankrupt yourself trying to prop up the false belief that like, and again, like Lazarus, another ridiculous analogy that Rutte put out there, they can rise from the dead.
Ukraine will not recover from this.
As we see today, Ukrainian air defense is non-existent and the Russians have free reign over the skies of Ukraine.
If we try to resurrect Ukrainian air defense, we'll just bankrupt ourselves and will further weaken ourselves.
I mean, there's a reason why Pete Hegseth froze American assistance from continuing to flow into Ukraine, and that is that we have literally tapped out our own stocks of air defense systems.
If, God forbid, we were ever to have a war with China over Taiwan, we have nothing to defend ourselves with.
If the Iranians ever decided to press forward and fire their most advanced missiles, remind your audience that the Iranian missile cities that the Iranians built were not tapped into during this most recent war.
Iran only used their older missile systems.
There was no use of the more advanced systems, which Iran has in great quantities.
And if Iran ever decided that it was necessary to continue the conflict with Israel and extend that conflict into striking American bases in the region, we have no way to defend ourselves.
We are literally defenseless.
And yet, you know, Trump wants to, what, continue providing air defense systems to Ukraine, air defense systems that the Russians have shown they can defeat at will.
The best thing to do is just let Ukraine die.
And remember, this isn't your kind old grandfather that we're asking to pass away.
This is, you know, there's an old story back in the 70s and 80s in Russia and Ukraine.
Don't ask grandpa, especially if he's a Ukrainian grandpa, what he did during the war, because you might find out that he killed Jews and killed Poles and fought on the side of the Nazis.
That's who we're asking to die here.
The old grandpa who has hidden his Nazi past, who when you dig through the basement, you find out he has the photographs of him posing over the bodies of dead Jews and Babi Yar of fighting alongside the Nazis.
This is who we're asking to die in hospice here.
Not kind old granddaddy, but mean old granddaddy, the worst kind of granddaddy, and he needs to die.
Ukraine needs to perish.
This bandarist history that has been allowed to continue by the CIA and by American money, by European money, it needs to end.
And Russia is going to bring it to an end.
Here's Trump yesterday.
You tell me if you think he understands what you just said.
I don't, but let's listen to him.
Chris, cut number four.
I'm helping it a lot.
And it's a war that should have never happened.
You said you had a strategic goal with Zelensky the other day.
Well, strategy, did you do that?
It was a good call.
He's being hit very hard, as I said he would.
He's being hit very hard.
And I was very disappointed with my goal with President Putin.
I was very disappointed.
What did he expect President Putin to do?
Roll over on the five or six contingencies that have to be met before the special military operation is over?
There's no rolling over on President Putin.
President Trump claims that he, my God, it's President Trump who shook the hand of Jolani, the HTS al-Nusra al-Qaeda ISIS terrorist, who previously had a $10 million bounty on his head, shook his hand, said, oh, he's a strong leader, a tough guy.
He had to make some tough calls, tough decisions, but he's a good guy.
I'll stand by him.
You're not disappointed, Jolani, for butchering Christian.
He just burned a Christian village, for butchering Christians at worship, for facilitating the deaths of thousands of Alawites, of other people who don't support his al-Qaeda regime?
No, no.
He's a strong guy, a tough guy.
Well, there ain't nobody stronger and tougher than Vladimir Putin, but we're not forced to hold our nose as we acknowledge this.
Putin's on the right side of history here, defeating the Banderist scum, these Nazi supporting criminals.
And Trump apparently doesn't realize that.
But what he does know is that Vladimir Putin is a strong leader.
He's not going to bend.
And at the end of the day, Trump acknowledges, I think, indirectly, that what's going to happen to Ukraine is going to happen to Ukraine.
He said, I told Ukraine what the consequences of not pursuing peace would be.
Well, those consequences are playing out.
And there's nothing that Donald Trump could do to alter this.
Well, Trump apparently has no compunction about shaking hands with murderous genocidal monsters.
He's having lunch with one as we speak.
Do you think that Netanyahu is going to feed him more arguments about how dangerous Iran is and how we have to drop more bombs on it?
Is that why he's there?
There's no doubt about that.
Netanyahu is there to basically steal the spine of Donald Trump when it comes to continuing to confront Iran.
But I think what Trump is finding out is that the Iranians are tough guys too.
And Netanyahu can pull the wool over the eyes of his public by continuing to censor the actual results of the Iranian strikes, but he can't pull the wool over the eyes of the president who knows damn well what was hit inside Israel.
And I believe the, you know, there's going to be a give and take where Trump is going to say, you, you know, you got hit pretty hard.
And now you want to talk about going back to these guys and continuing to strike these guys, but they have a hell of a punch.
What are we going to do when they punch back?
And we don't have the ability to defend.
It turns out what, I think they just found out 97 fad missiles, very expensive advanced interceptor missiles were fired during these 12 days, depleting the American stock, bankrupting the American taxpayer.
You know, they don't grow on trees, these interceptors.
And Trump will say to Netanyahu, where do you think this stuff's going to come from?
To defend you?
How do you plan on defending yourself?
And, you know, to what end are we doing this?
So I think there's going to be some pretty tough discussions behind the scenes.
And the other thing that Trump is going to tell Benjamin Netanyahu is you need to clean up, you know, get your act together at home.
You're on trial.
You know, I can only post so many social media postings out there threatening sanctions against Israel if they continue to pursue this.
But before you talk about going to war with Iran and continuing this fight in Gaza, maybe you need to solidify your domestic political base at home so that if we do side with you, you don't get swept away and then I have to deal with somebody else.
This is a very complicated situation here.
Netanyahu is trying once again to wrap himself in the flag of the United States of America so they can sell himself as an American-backed savior of Israel to the Israeli public, who increasingly is finding that lie a very difficult spoon of poison to swallow.
As if all this weren't bad enough, here's John Bolton.
Here's a tweet from John Bolton yesterday.
We must finish the job in Iran.
Critics of the U.S. strike in Iran are still fighting the last war in Iraq, wringing their hands rather than accomplishing anything.
Iran's worldwide terrorist proxies and advanced nuclear programs are orders of magnitude more threatening than Saddam Hussein's Iraq.
Moreover, no boots on the ground need be involved.
Iran is not Iraq, which Jerusalem and Washington have already partly demonstrated.
I suppose one of the best things Trump did was fire Bolton, but not after we listened to him.
No, I mean, John Bolton is, I'd like to just say he's a joke, but it was a dangerous joke because he continues to, you know, his voice continues to resonate in certain circles in Washington, D.C.
And what's scary is that outlet like the New York Times are publishing his work, you know, which means that his voice is also resonating with Democrats.
You know, the United States, these elites that define the establishment are warmongers.
They are desperate for conflict.
They need conflict to continue to feed this military-industrial congressional complex where money gets poured into the defense industry who pours out weapons that needs to be expended in wars so that this cycle of monetized violence continues.
And John Bolton is the manifestation of this, and we need to recognize that.
He's not looking to defend America, make things better for Americans.
This is a man who has been willing to sacrifice American blood to keep this machine going.
He is behind the lies that were told to the American people in Iraq about Iraqi WMD.
And now he's telling more lies, peddling lies.
He's been peddling the same lie about Iranian nuclear threat for decades now.
And I would hope that the American people would see through this.
It's time for MAGA, to be honest here, to step up, step up your game.
You know, you voted for this guy, this president, because he said he was going to avoid wars.
So why do you allow people like John Bolton to have an echo chamber in your mind?
This man wants you to go to war, not because he's looking to make America greater again, but because he's looking to promote the same military-industrial complex that has given us all the wars in the past that Donald Trump said he was going to try to avoid getting dragged back into.
This is what he's trying to drag us into.
Yes, we dropped bombs on Iran.
Let's not make that mistake again.
Let's find a path towards peace.
Did you not listen to Tucker Carlson's interview with the Iranian president?
There does not need to be a war with Iran.
This is part of the pro-Israeli greater Israel fantasy that's being sold to the American people.
But, you know, MAGA is make America great again, not make Israel great again.
And we need to remember that there is a separation between these two, that just because it's good for Israel doesn't mean it's good for America.
And oftentimes, if it's good for Israel, it definitely means it's bad for America.
John Bolton is pro-Israel, not pro-America.
We should never forget that.
Before we go, for those that haven't seen it yet, tell us about Highway to Hell.
Highway to Hell is a book that I wrote to the Armageddon Chronicles, 2015, 2024, to highlight the threat that nuclear weapons pose to the American people and to the world and the absolute need for arms control.
I just remind you that John Bolton is anti-arms control.
He is pro-arms race.
He's the guy that's going to get you all killed.
Highway to Hell is a book that if you read it, you will be empowered with the wisdom to stand up to those people who promote a continuation of the idealization of nuclear weapons.
And it also will empower you to recognize the absolute necessity of disarmament and arms control if we're going to survive as American people or humanity collective.
Scott Ritter, thank you, my dear man.
Thank you for letting me go across the board on all these subject matters.
Thanks for your passion and your courage.
As always, all the best, my friend.
Thank you.
Of course.
A great man with an unbelievable knowledge of all this and enough personal courage for, well, a lot of personal courage.
up at two o'clock today, Professor Jeffrey Sachs, Stras. Napolitano for Judging Freedom.
Scott Rader, welcome here, my dear friend.
Can Trump resist the neocons with whom he surrounded himself?
Well, I mean, that's a fair question, ultimately.
When we take a look at the composition of Donald Trump's cabinet and, you know, his closest advisory bodies, we see a split between what I'll call the MAGA thinkers.
These are people who have broken with the neoconservative policies of the past, who believe that the United States must chart a new course forward.
These are people like JD Vance, like Tulsi Gabbard, like Steve Witkoff, this surprising name that's appeared out of nowhere to become literally the top diplomat of the United States.
These three people are very pragmatic, realistic, and they seem to be supportive of Trump's stated agenda of avoiding war, seeking peace.
But Trump has also surrounded himself with an entire team of neoconservatives.
The Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, is the most neoconservative of neocur conservatives.
And now he is double-hatted as the national security advisor of the United States.
This is constitutionally questionable.
And it's just not good policy.
But, you know, Mike Waltz, who was a neoconservative, got caught conspiring behind Donald Trump's back, apparently, with the Israelis.
Steve Kellogg is there.
The Secretary of Treasury is a neoconservative.
And so these are people who are pushing for very hardline policies, people who seem to support Israel's posture vis-a-vis Iran, Israel's insistence of no nuclear enrichment whatsoever, which would kill any prospect for peace.
These are people who continue to breathe life into Zelensky, into the Europeans, and into bringing an end to the Ukraine conflict in a way that doesn't really end the conflict, just buys Ukraine time to rearm, re-equip, and be prepared to fight this in five years.
So Donald Trump, I think he's a man who, you know, I used to work for a boss who I was told you need to be the last person to brief him during the day.
And sure enough, everybody knew this.
And at the end of the day, if you're trying to get something done, you lined up outside of his office and you waited and waited till you could sneak in and be the last person because the last person who briefed him tended to be the person that influenced his decision making at the close of the day.
This is the sign of a simple mind.
Does Donald Trump believe whoever he's been talking to last?
You know, I've spent the last 100 days trying to go easy on Donald Trump because he's my commander in chief and he's somebody who I want to succeed.
And I still want him to succeed.
But I think 100 days is more than enough time for the president of the United States to figure out who he is and what he is and what he stands for, especially a president that's previously served four years in the White House.
And so I think it's time now for the gloves to come off.
Donald Trump is a simple mind.
I mean, we've always known this.
He's not a complicated thinker, especially when it comes to foreign policy.
He knows nothing about foreign policy.
And he's a man who literally repeats the last thing he was told.
Look at the nonsense he did with the MS-13 photograph.
He was told by somebody that there was MS-13 on the, he was shown an image, and that went into his simple mind.
He's not capable of complex reasoning.
He's not a knowledgeable man about the issues at hand.
So yes, this simple-minded man does, in fact, listen to the last thing he is told by the people surrounding him.
You ticked off the names of the people around him, and we could go deeper into Sebastian Gorka and that crowd.
And I agree with you.
Some of them are hardcore neocons like Rubio.
Some of them are definitely not neocons like Gabbard and Vance.
But the one thing they all have in common, Zionists.
Am I right?
You are right.
But as I've said on your show before, Judge, I think that Donald Trump is more complex on Zionism than I don't think he's a Zionist at heart.
I think that he is a political machine who understands that in order to become elected president, you have to surround yourself, cloak yourself, coach yourself with Zionists.
And he has done that.
But I do believe that he understands that if you're going to be America first, you must be America first.
And what we're seeing is having brought so many Zionists in around him, it's the old godfather saying, you know, keep your friends close, but your enemies closer.
And Zionism is the enemy of America.
And we're starting to see some pushback on this where Donald Trump is especially lashing out against Benjamin Netanyahu, whom he apparently has caught red-handed, conspiring with his inner circle, Mr. Waltz, to name one, to undermine Trump's own policies.
All right, I agree with everything you've just said.
Do you believe the news reports from your own observations or your own sources that Trump is sick and tired of Netanyahu and believes that Netanyahu has been manipulating him, whether it's the Waltz incident or other things?
100%.
We know that he was sick and tired of Benjamin Netanyahu before he was sworn in as president.
Why else would he play a couple of Jeffrey Sachs clips that condemned Benjamin Netanyahu and pointed out that Netanyahu is responsible for getting America involved in the very Middle East conflicts that Donald Trump has so rightfully criticized?
And Netanyahu's trying to get us knee-deep in another Middle East war with Iran, something Donald Trump does not want to do.
And so I think it's clear that Donald Trump has made a decision that Netanyahu is bad for America.
And we're seeing a divorce take place live before us.
It's an ugly divorce, but there's a divorce happening right now.
So the U.S. negotiates directly with Hamas, directly with Hamas, no Israeli involvement whatsoever for the release of an American-Israeli joint citizenship, born in New Jersey, 18 years in New Jersey, went to Israel for the IDF.
He was released today.
The U.S. instigates humanitarian relief in Gaza without the knowledge or consent of Netanyahu.
The U.S. stops killing the Houthis without the knowledge or consent of Netanyahu.
The U.S. sends B-52 bombers home to the United States without the knowledge or consent of Netanyahu.
I guess he's trying to send Netanyahu some kind of a concrete message.
There's another one.
Steve Witkoff is, as we speak, negotiating with the Iranians in a deal that would allow Iran to retain its nuclear enrichment capabilities.
I keep hearing the opposite.
Alastair says, and he agrees with you that Iranians will never agree with this, that Witkoff has now changed and wants no enrichment.
So let me just back over.
You're the expert on nuclear, all things nuclear.
Educate us a little bit.
If you want to use nuclear sources for hospital purposes, do you need enrichment?
If you have, for instance, Iran has a the Tehran research reactor is used to create medical isotopes.
And it uses it uses 20% enriched fuel.
It had previously received this fuel from overseas sources.
It ran out of fuel.
Nobody would supply them with fuel.
So Iran had no choice but to make its own fuel, which it has done.
Iran also has a nuclear power reactor, several of them at the Bushir facility.
Again, it requires 3.6, 3.7% enriched uranium.
The United States led the global boycott to prevent Iran from acquiring this fuel from abroad.
So Iran developed its own enrichment capability.
Today, people are talking about, you know, they guarantee Iran's continued access to fuel from abroad, but Iran says, fool me once, you know, blame, shame on me.
So where is Witkoff on this now?
Is he negotiating for them to keep a certain amount of enrichment?
They have superb hospitals.
You can't run a hospital today without certain nuclear isotopes.
My understanding is that there were three rounds of negotiations, and at the end of the third round, they had moved into the technical phase.
And I'm just telling you right now, the technical phase is how do you monitor Iran's enrichment program?
That's the discussion they were having when the Israelis said 0-0-0.
And Witcoff came out and made a statement to that regard.
There is a fourth round taking place right now that are getting ready to take place where the Iranians are saying we are very pleased with what's happening.
The United States has taken a realistic posture.
This means that the Israelis lost, that the United States is talking about a deal because there will be no deal.
They're talking about a deal that has Iran retaining aspects of its enrichment program.
All right.
So here is what I think is nonsensical, but you know this better than I.
And it's not because I used to work there and I don't anymore, but it's Fox News claiming they found a nuclear reactor in Iran.
Chris?
Fox News exclusive satellite images revealing the location of a previously unknown Iranian nuclear site.
Now, the facility spans nearly 2,500 acres.
And this is a big discovery.
Jillian Turner has more from the State Department.
Good morning, Jillian.
Pretty explosive, Dana.
These satellite images that we have obtained exclusively show the alleged site location and even the layout of the secret previously unknown nuclear weapons facilities inside Iran.
This, of course, raises fresh concerns about the regime's role in these ongoing nuclear talks with the Trump administration.
The National Council of Resistance of Iran has collected intelligence from sources on the ground inside Iran that locate this nuclear weapons facility in what is called Semnan province, far from the regime's already known nuclear sites.
It's codenamed the Rainbow Site by Iran's officials, and it spans nearly 2,500 acres.
It's been operating as far as we can discern for over a decade under the cover of a chemical production company that's called Diba Energy SIBA.
The so-called this was late last week.
I haven't heard it anywhere since then.
Is this credible?
No, not at all.
Look, the NCRI, the National Council of Resistance in Iran, they're also known as the Mujahedin al-Khalk.
These are Marxists.
They've been against the Iranian regime since 1979.
We conspired with them to orchestrate.
The CIA works with them to orchestrate assassinations.
The Israelis use them for assassinations.
And these are people who have in the past given briefings written by the Israelis.
This briefing is written by the Israelis.
Now, it's delivered here in the United States.
And this is where I don't understand why Tulsi Gabber doesn't shut them down, because this is done by the, this is the Israelis seeking to throw a wrench into the negotiations.
Look at the timing of it.
This is a garbage report.
First of all, when they called it a nuclear weapons facility, what they're talking about is they say that the Iranians could be producing tritium.
I may be pronouncing that wrong because I am not a nuclear scientist, but tritium is used in a boosted nuclear weapon.
So if you have a standard fission weapon, if you have tritium in place, you can boost it.
It shoots in these neutrons, gets hyperactive, then you turn it into a fusion weapon, a hydrogen bomb.
And that's what they're talking about.
This is absurd in the extreme.
Again, the International Atomic Energy Agency has had Iran under very stringent inspections.
They look for these sort of things.
This is simply an effort.
What the NCRI and Israel is trying to do is open up this gigantic, very sensitive military industrial facility.
Parchin is where they make their ballistic missiles.
They have the chemical facilities that produce the precursor elements for the solid rocket fuel that are produced there.
They want to create a condition where inspectors now will demand access to these facilities at the very moment when Trump's negotiator is talking with the Iranians about inspections.
So, no, there's nothing to this story whatsoever.
This is as garbage as garbage.
And shame on Fox News for running with this story.
Literally, why don't you have me on, Fox, at least to counterbalance it so I can show you kind of idiots you are.
This is stupidity in the extreme.
Let's go back to Trump and the neocons.
And I appreciate the analysis you just gave.
I didn't know where we were going to go there, but our conversation took us there.
During his first term in office, didn't Trump effectively grow by trebling the Ukraine military?
Didn't all that happen under him?
More than that, Judge.
This is Donald Trump's war.
He's trying to call it Joe Biden's war.
He says, this is Joe's Biden's war.
This war never would have happened had I been president.
That's a lie, a straight up lie, because when he was president, the policies he eventually signed off on were supportive of the very policies that Joe Biden inherited from him and then expanded upon.
Joe Biden did not invent the policies that led us to the conflict with Russia and Ukraine.
Donald Trump is the one that took Barack Obama's policies, which were defensive only, defensive only, and Donald Trump turned them into offensive training, offensive weaponry, because the Ukrainians said, we want to invade the Donbass.
And the United States under Donald Trump went, we'll get you ready to invade the Donbass.
Donald Trump is the man who created the concept of strategic defeat of Russia.
He's the man who underwrit 20 CIA bases operating on Ukrainian soil.
20 CIA bases.
Talk to Larry Johnson, what a CIA base is and what they do.
Talk to Aleister Crook, what that means in terms of it.
This isn't about analysts like me sitting back there reading things.
No, this is about operators, paramilitary guys, training people to go into Russia to spy, to carry on unconventional warfare, to target assassination, all the things necessary to bring down a government.
That's what Donald Trump's policies were.
And then he lost the presidency.
Joe Biden picked it up and Joe Biden ran with it.
Joe Biden actually had to tune down some of the things Trump was trying to do with the paramilitary guys.
All this paramilitary, unconventional warfare stuff began with Donald Trump.
And it was the Biden administration who went, well, that's an act of war.
We may want to tone that down.
So Trump is responsible 100% for this mess.
And Trump is now boasting about sending or authorizing attackems, terrorists, and javelins to Ukraine.
Isn't he making?
Aren't we a co-belligerent fighting Russia?
And how can the Kremlin take us seriously as mediators?
Look, the Kremlin right now, again, I don't speak for them, but I have spoken with people.
I just enjoyed the Victory Day celebration at the Russian embassy.
The Russians, they're realistic.
They're pragmatic.
They are thrilled to death that they're talking to the United States because that wasn't happening under Joe Biden.
And so as long as they're talking, that creates the possibility of something happening.
But they also look at the inherent contradictions.
They have no false expectations from the Trump administration.
This is confusing.
I just, I spoke to a friend who I speak to often about the situation in Ukraine.
And this person is confused.
Everybody's confused.
People I speak to in Moscow are confused.
People I speak here, everybody's confused about what Donald Trump wants.
On the one hand, he speaks of peace.
He speaks of understanding the Russian perspective.
On the other hand, he does this.
He sends weapons.
The stupidity of it.
Now he's on an airplane where he may go to Istanbul to Zelensky in Istanbul.
Putin might be flying to Tehran with a quick trip.
You know, what do they do if they meet?
Will Trump tell Zelensky you have to back down, accept the Russian terms, or will he try to strong-arm Putin, which you don't do?
And I don't think Putin would show up in Istanbul if he thought Trump was going to try and strongarm.
Donald Trump is, remember what we said at the beginning, Judge?
He's a simple man, a simple-minded man.
I hope he has somebody sitting next to him who's giving him good advice.
I hope who's going to be sitting next to him, but the super neocon Marco Rubio.
Well, Rubio is going to Istanbul to do a, what they call it, a NATO mini ministerial that was sort of invented to interfere with Vladimir Putin's initiative.
The Russians said, hey, we're going to send Yuri Ushikov to Istanbul to meet with a Ukrainian delegation.
Ukraine has said, well, Zelensky said, I'm going to be there.
I want to meet with Putin.
And the Russians are like, well, it's Ushikov.
Now, Rubio is coming in on the spur of the moment to do this 14 to 16 May ministerial, but it's there simply to interfere.
And now we have Donald Trump apparently showing up, which once again shows the struggle because Trump doesn't.
I believe that Trump doesn't trust Rubio when it comes to Russia.
I think he understands that Rubio is the man giving him the advice that is going to lead to enhanced conflict.
He wants to trust Witkov, but he's a weak man.
He's a simple-minded man.
And the person sitting right next to him before he opens his mouth or starts putting stuff out on social media is the person that influences what he says and what he does.
Tulsi Gabbard's got to be going crazy because that's supposed to be her job.
But the problem is she briefs him in the morning.
So she comes in, briefs him in the morning, and he's probably all gung-ho to be realistic.
And then as the day goes on, people come in.
Yeah, Sebastian Gorka and that crowd get to him.
Oh, yeah.
We have a new cut from Trump on the upcoming talks in Turkey about possibly ready for this?
Lifting sanctions on Syria.
Watch this.
Don't underestimate Thursday in Turkey.
President Erdogan is going to be a great host.
And we are doing some work with him, having to do with Syria too, by the way.
We're going to have to make a decision on the sanctions, which we may very well relieve.
We may take them off of Syria because we want to give them a fresh start.
Look, Syria is governed by al-Qaeda right now.
This shows you how simplistically stupid Donald Trump is.
You know, if you want to make that step, I know what he's doing because what wasn't said there is that the deal is that Saudi Arabia will recognize Israel in exchange for Trump.
Well, I think that's with Hamas.
Trump is going to recognize Palestine.
Saudi Arabia is going to recognize Israel.
Trump's going to lift sanctions on Jolani and Syria.
And that's going to create opportunities.
He's going to recognize Palestine.
Netanyahu will have a heart attack.
Well, I think that's what he wants.
At this point, if Netanyahu killed over dead, Donald Trump would hold a party.
He doesn't like Netanyahu.
He never has liked Netanyahu.
And this is Netanyahu's fault.
You know, Netanyahu is the man who lies straight to the president's face and then conspires behind the president.
Donald Trump is a narcissist, a supreme narcissist.
And the way you deal with narcissists is to stroke their egos.
And you don't get caught speaking ill of them behind their back.
You want to know why Steve Witkoff is so popular?
Because he's never said a bad thing about Donald Trump.
And when the time came, and this is before Trump was president, Witkoff stood up for Donald Trump, defended Donald Trump, went to bat for Donald Trump.
And Donald Trump recognizes that kind of loyalty.
Netanyahu is not a loyal man.
And Donald Trump's saying, we give you everything.
We give you the bombs.
We give you everything you need, everything you want.
And you betray me.
You stab me in the back.
I mean, this is literally Michael Corleone basically taking Fredo out in the boat and popping him around.
Does the neocon mentality still hate all things Russian?
Yes.
First of all, hate's a very strong word.
Okay.
Because to hate, you have to actually understand something.
You have to know something about it.
To hate means you have a deep insight into something, and it's so viscerally against everything you stand for, you hate it.
Neocons don't hate Russia because they don't know anything about Russia.
Literally, I could take all the neocons today, put the totality of the knowledge they have about Russia, and it would fit into the head of this pen.
They are that stupid and that ignorant.
What's the word to describe their feeling about Russia?
Fear?
No, no, they don't fear Russia.
They want you to fear Russia.
See, they use Russia as a tool to manipulate the public.
This is what Russophobia is all about.
Their job is to spew lies about Russia, to tell mistruths about Russia, to make the public afraid of Russia so that the public will then nod their heads stupidly when they put forward idiotic policy about Russia.
That's what the neocons are about.
They don't fear Russia.
I mean, because they know Russia is not a threat.
You know, you don't need to lie.
You don't need to manipulate if there's a true threat out there.
If Russia was a genuine threat to the United States, it would be the easiest thing in the world to sell.
But why do the neocons wrap themselves in lies?
Because the truth about Russia is the exact opposite.
They are not our enemies.
They are our friends.
Victor A.J. just proved it.
The 80th anniversary of when Americans and Russians stood side by side and defeated the worst threat the world has ever seen in the past couple centuries, Nazi Germany.
And yet the neocons now have Donald Trump saying stupid things like, yeah, the Russians did a little bit.
You know, they lost a lot of guys, but they couldn't have won that war, not even close without us and the great contribution which we made.
We made great contributions.
I will never denigrate the sacrifice made by any American in that conflict.
We did great things.
We fought on two fronts against two massive enemies and we contributed to the victories.
But to pretend that our going across on D-Day on June 1944 somehow turned the tide after the Russians stood strong at Stalingrad, crushed the Sixth Army, stood at Kursk, carried out operations in the Carpathian region that drew seven divisions away from the Normandy front in May before we went across.
If those seven divisions were there, we would have lost.
Eisenhower would have had to read that note that he had in his pocket.
Yet that's the truth about World War II.
We did a lot.
We sacrificed a lot, but we could not have beaten Nazi Germany without the Soviet army, the Red Army, that destroyed 76 to 80 percent of the German, the best German units were destroyed by the Red Army on the Eastern Front, not on the Western front.
And you know who agreed with you?
Uh, was Winston Churchill, who said the Red Army, quote, tore the guts out of the Wehrmacht.
That's what he was talking about, what you just described.
Yeah, 100%.
And remember, and Churchill was no friend of the Soviet Union.
He's the man who came up with the plan right after World War II to assassinate Stalin and bring down the Soviet Union.
So it's not as though Winston Churchill was a died-in-the-wol committee was saying that he just said the reality of it.
Wow.
Trump has now said that he may very well fly to Turkey to try and initiate talks between Putin and Zelensky.
Putin's not going to be in Turkey, is he?
No, but this is where it gets really interesting, Judge.
Putin's flying to Tehran.
And, you know, Trump is, you know, this is where his real estate mind comes into play, where there's so many factors going in on the deal.
Russia is the secret sauce, the secret ingredient to our negotiations with Iran.
Russia is behind the scenes doing things, helping us make sense to the Iran, getting the Iranians to the table.
Russia's there to backstop us.
And Putin's going to Iran right now, and he's going to be having conversations with the supreme leader and the Iranian president.
But that also positions him, A, to do a couple things where Trump's going to owe him because he's going to say, look, I'm helping you win this Iran thing.
Now I'm in Tehran.
If you can get Zelensky to cave on Russian territorial demands, and you get Zelensky there ready to sign a document, and you're there, Mr. President, and you're going to be there as the guarantor of this, maybe Putin will come in.
I would not want to be a Russian diplomat or an American diplomat right now because you know they are going absolutely bananas trying to backstop this stuff because you don't bring your principles together unless you have everything in order.
And so they are working overtime right now to try and get all of this done.
Because I think Trump has said, I want something to happen in Istanbul.
And Putin wouldn't be going to Tehran unless he was like, I'm willing to let something happen in Istanbul, but you have to meet our concerns.
And Steve Witkoff knows every single one of those concerns inside and out.
And Marco Rubio is going to try and sabotage every single one of those concerns.
And Steve Kellogg should be sent as far away from this discussion as possible.
And JD Vance should be hanging around, whispering sweet nothings in the president's ear to keep him on focus.
Here's what Trump just said about Turkey.
I think you may have a good result out of the Thursday meeting in Turkey between Russia and Ukraine.
And I believe the two leaders were going to be there.
I was thinking about flying over.
I don't know where I'm going to be on Thursday.
I've got so many meetings, but I was thinking about actually flying over there.
There's a possibility of it, I guess, if I think things can happen.
Wow.
Again, Netanyahu is going to have a heart attack if Trump cuts a deal with Putin and with the president of Iran.
Yeah, no, this is a divorce from Netanyahu.
And it's interesting because Netanyahu then has spoken about detoxing Israel from American security systems.
What the hell?
Of course, now they're meeting with the Germans.
You might see the Germans say, well, we will back you up.
We will give you the weaponry and all that stuff.
Great.
So Germany is once again on the side of genocide.
That's nice.
But I think this is Israel floundering right now.
This is, again, the success of Hamas.
For all the people that didn't, you know, when I said, look, Hamas beat the Israelis for 15 months.
In the end, they had to take a compromise, bring in this deal.
But Hamas has a lot to play.
You know, there's a lot of Hamas left.
And for Trump, who said Hamas is a terrorist organization, will never deal with them, will never function with them, now directly negotiate with them to get an American hostage released and talking about recognizing a Palestine with what?
The very Hamas people that he talked to.
He's meeting with Jolani, an al-Qaeda terrorist, who just a few months ago had a $10 million ward on his head.
So please, people, you know, let's just keep the right people whispering in Donald Trump's ear.
A $10 million reward on his head posted by his own State Department.
Yeah.
Can't make this up.
Scotty, thank you very much.
Don't forget about this judge.
There's a reason why there's 10 million.
He killed Americans.
This is a man.
Jolani killed Americans.
Jolani killed Americans.
Jolani was AQI before he became ISIS before he came al-Nusra.
This is a man who in Iraq was responsible for the deaths of Americans.
And now we're going to have the president of the United States meet this guy.
I'm not saying that, you know, there's no under no circumstance should this ever happen, but let's understand what's happening here.
This isn't just a casual meeting.
This is the president of the United States meeting with an al-Qaeda terrorist leader who killed Americans and has a $10 million bounty on his head.
And we're going to normalize relations with this guy.
Hey, why couldn't we just normalize relations with Bashar al-Assad?
It would have been a hell of a lot easier and we wouldn't have to put up with any of this nonsense.
Thank you, my dear friend.
Well, we covered a vast array of issues, and I deeply appreciate your analysis, Scotty.
All the best to you.
We'll see you again next week.
Thank you.
Of course, coming up on all of this at 4:30 this afternoon, Professor Jeffrey Sachs, Dresden the Paul Channel for Judging Freedom.
Scott Reader, welcome here, my dear friend.
Before we get to the back and forth between President Trump and President Putin, some other things that are bubbling up, I'm impressed negatively, of course, by the bellicosity of people like Keir Stormer and Manuel Macron, Ursula von der Leyen.
Is Europe preparing for war with Russia or do they think they're preparing for war with Russia?
No, and anybody who knows knows that they're not because they can't.
I mean, words does not translate into reality.
And no matter how bellicose the rhetoric is out of Brussels and Paris and London, the reality is that the European armies cannot muster sufficient forces and sustain them logistically to have any meaningful impact.
But what they are doing, and I think this will play into what we'll be talking about later, is tying up Donald Trump's hands.
Because by bringing up this language and seeking to detach themselves from the United States, they're calling his bluff.
You know, Donald Trump has been saying, oh, well, NATO is not essential to us.
We could withdraw from NATO.
We could do this.
But Europeans are calling this bluff, saying, okay, let's start talking about a world without America and NATO.
And while the long-term objective of the Trump administration may be to disentangle ourselves from NATO in the short term, if we divorce ourselves from NATO, we can't control the direction or the tenor of what Europe does in the future.
So they've called Trump's bluff.
This is one of the reasons why he is downshifted on moving forward with a peace plan with Russia because Europe is complicated.
This Trump didn't have a plan B to deal with this.
So no, but Europe's not going to go to war.
They don't think they could.
What they're doing is muddying the waters for Donald Trump's prospects of peace with the US.
Very interesting, very interesting analysis, Scott.
You know, when I was invited to ask a few questions to Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, one of the questions that I did ask him was, what do you think will become of NATO if the U.S. leaves?
And he looks at me and says, I don't think the U.S. will leave.
I know the president is threatening, but I don't think he's going to do it.
Do you share that view?
Long term, I think the United States would like to disentangle, but the Trump administration is of the opinion that before the U.S. even can consider that, Europe has to learn how to stand on their own two feet.
But we want to teach them how to stand.
We want to be the ones.
We want a NATO that, while we don't pay the price we're paying, still does our bidding, which may be, of course, a bridge too far and impossible to achieve.
But I think in the short term, Sergei Lavs is right.
Look, if Trump wanted out of NATO, they've given us more than enough justification to pull the plug.
But Europe has successfully called Trump's bluff.
So before he's even chancellor, Frederick Mertz got the Reichstag to change the German constitution, which allows either a greater percentage of GNP to be spent on defense or a higher debt ceiling, whatever the mechanism was, to allow for a substantial increase in defense spending.
Do you have an understanding of why?
His political survival is contingent upon his ability to position Europe as a leader in Europe, to, I mean, position Germany as a leader in Europe.
And he has a good sense of the feel of the political winds.
And he knows that European security independence is essential in terms of being projected by the current leadership if they want to stay leaders.
Understand that there's a tremendous amount of opposition to this.
Within Germany itself, the alternative for Deutschland, AFD, is fundamentally opposed to this.
And they came in with the second largest voter turnout.
So he can't take the middle ground because in doing so, he plays to AFD's strength.
So he's taking an opposing point in hope that being backed by Paris, who, again, here we have Macron imprisoning Le Pen.
We have Starmer, you know, who has no support.
We have Europe.
You know, all of this talk about a European force going into Ukraine is contingent upon Romania staying in play.
And we have a situation where the Romanian presidential election in May may go to a party that wants to unplug Romania.
So Germany has to lean forward aggressively as part of an overall European Union strategy, but it's suicidal.
In the end, this will bring about the economic ruin of Germany.
But since when did politicians care about long-term consequences?
They only care about short-term political gains.
Right.
They care about staying in power.
Going to the other side of the earth, Secretary of Defense Hegseth was in Japan.
Now, maybe he's trying to get people's minds off the signal imbrolio, but he seemed to be saber-rattling saying the United States is prepared to fight China over Taiwan.
Does he know what he's talking about?
I would hope that he's familiarized himself with the war plans.
And he himself indicated that he was cognizant of previous war games where the United States lost every time.
And nothing has changed that fundamentally in terms of force structure and capabilities that would suggest the United States will do anything other than lose if we continue if we push for a conflict with China today.
You know, this is part of this ridiculous peace through strength mantra that the Trump administration has embraced.
But for that to work, there has to be genuine strength.
And the United States doesn't have genuine strength of the conventional kind.
And if he's talking about the potential of nuclear conflict with China, then we've entered a whole completely different paradigm that's irresponsible in the extreme.
Over the weekend, the IDF executed one after another after another, I could say that 15 times 15 UN health workers in Gaza.
And there doesn't seem to be any reaction on the part of the United States, no condemnation.
In fact, when Tammy Bruce, with whom I used to work at Fox and who now is a State Department spokesperson, was asked about this, all she did was blame Hamas.
Chris Cut number 19, the UN's humanitarian affairs office has said that 15 paramedics, civil defense, and UN worker were killed, and that was one by one by the RDF.
They have dug all these up, they said, in the Shala Grave, that have been gathered up and also vehicles in the sand.
Have you got any assessment of what might have happened and given the potential use of American weapons?
Is there any assessment of whether or not this complied with international law?
Well, I can tell you that for too long, Hamas has abused civilian infrastructure, cynically using it to shield themselves.
Hamas's actions have caused humanitarians to be caught in the crossfire.
The use of civilians or civilian objects to shield or impede military operations is itself a violation of international humanitarian law.
And of course, we expect all parties on the ground to comply with international humanitarian law.
But it's specifically a question on any it's a question about accounting and accountability, given it may have been the use of U.S. weapons.
So it's a question about the State Department rather than Hamas.
Is there any actions?
Every single thing that is happening in Gaza is happening because of Hamas.
Every single dynamic.
I'll say again, I've said it, I think, in every briefing.
All of this could stop in a moment if Hamas returned all the hostages and the hostage bodies they are still holding and put down its weapons.
There is one entity that could stop it for everyone in a moment, and that is Hamas.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
This is as crazy as her predecessor.
Yeah, the one entity that could stop this is Donald Trump with a phone call to Netanyahu saying, we're not sending you any more weapons with which to kill.
Did she address the slaughter of these 15 UN aid workers?
No, and she doesn't care about them, and nor does the Trump administration.
And frankly speaking, increasingly, nor does the rest of the world.
This is the problem.
I'm looking back and reevaluating Trump's embrace of the ceasefire because when it originally came out, and you know this, I thought that it was indeed a legitimate attempt to bring peace and stability into a region that's beset by horrifically complicated problems.
But it appears increasingly that this was just a psychological warfare game, lulling people who were exhausted by 15 months of incessant violence, lulling them into the belief that there could be peace, and then resuming the conflict and blaming Hamas for everything.
And I think we've seen a global community that's increasingly becoming exhausted by the Palestinian issue, so much so that they're remaining silent about the murder of 16 aid workers, the murder of 16 aid workers.
Where is the condemnation that should be happening?
Where are the demonstrations in the streets?
Here in the United States, the Trump administration is making it illegal even to think that this could be a crime.
I think that the Trump administration is even worse than the Biden administration, because as bad as the Biden administration was on this issue, it at least responded to international condemnation, at least showed that it was listening and that it cared.
I don't think Trump cares at all.
I think this is an administration that is absolutely unforgivable in the approach they've taken that disrespects the value of life amongst the people in Palestine and uncritical of an Israeli regime that is the most craven violator of international law there is.
I mean, for this spokeslady to be talking about international humanitarian law in the context of Israel is disgusting.
Here is the human being that is behind all of this, in my view, and I suspect in yours, from the suppression of free speech in the United States to the slaughter of humanitarian United Nations aid workers.
Chris, number 11.
These ignorant demonstrators, who are they demonstrating for for these murderers, these rapists, these mass killers.
This is a reflection of a deep rot that has pervaded the intellectual hub of free societies.
And this vilification of Israel, the Jewish people, and Western values has been propagated by a systemic alliance between the ultra-progressive left and radical Islam.
It must be resolutely fought by civilized societies to safeguard their future.
This is why we must all come in President Trump's decisive actions against anti-Semitism.
And we must pressure other governments to do the same.
You catch those last words.
And we must pressure other governments to do the same.
He knows he's the king of the hill.
Well, I'll take a different spin on this.
He knows he's a powerful tool, but the king of the hill is Donald Trump.
As you rightfully pointed out earlier, one phone call brings this to an end.
And while Netanyahu is up there, you know, acting tough, remember, domestically, he's in a horrible position, under tremendous pressure.
The Shinbet, his internal security forces have turned against him.
He's under investigation for corruption and for violating state secrets and for misleading the Israeli population.
He's highly unpopular.
He's a tool that's being used by the United States to achieve objectives.
And we see that the control mechanisms being put in place today in the United States that violate free speech, they're using Israel and anti-Semitism as the vector to introduce them.
But as you know, Judge, once a right is conceded, you never get it back.
Once you open up a chink in that armor and let the enemy in, you lose the whole game.
And so this is a very dangerous time in the United States where we're allowing Israel, the cause of Israel to be used by American domestic power, political powers to take control over the totality of the American people, to deny us the one thing that gives us all of us the ability to fight back, which is free speech.
So I view Netanyahu more as a compliant tool than the one calling the shots.
He's the puppet, not the puppet master.
But if he is the tool, what is Trump's goal?
Is it just to please his Zionist benefactors in the United States?
Trump doesn't have serious concerns about the Gazan people.
We know that.
He couldn't care less about them.
No, I think he's using this issue as a means of putting in place a framework of authoritarianism.
I mean, I hate to say it.
I'd like to believe otherwise.
But when I take a look at the laws being talked, the rhetoric being used, you know, again, as you know full well, Zionism is the cause, but the framing of the argument that allows the Trump administration to target free speech, once they have that framework in place, they can remove the term Zionism and insert anything.
And I think that's the goal.
This is about absolute control of America in a way that differs greatly from the vision of our founding fathers.
Here's what the Iranian leadership, both the Ayatollah and a leading general, had to say in response to the rantings and ravings we just showed from Tammy Bruce at the State Department.
Chris, cut number 20.
The enmity from the U.S. and Israel has always been there.
They threaten to attack us, which we don't think is very likely.
But if they do commit any mischief, they will surely receive a strong reciprocal blow.
The Americans have at least 10 bases and 50,000 forces near Iran.
This means they are sitting in a glass room.
Someone sitting in a glass room should not throw rocks at others.
Do you know this, general?
Do we have 10 bases in the region?
Do we have 50,000 troops sitting there as sitting ducks, as he claims?
He's right.
I mean, that's been the case all along.
Iran has some very capable ballistic missile forces, but I'll push back on him.
And if I were talking to him, I'd say the same thing.
Don't confuse a glass Airbnb with a glass house because striking these bases is not striking America.
And yes, you may do harm to these bases and all that.
We will destroy your nation.
And that's not a threat.
That's not me threatening.
It's a statement of fact.
The United States of America will not lose an existential battle against Iran.
We have the ability to destroy Iran.
Iran can hurt us, but not survive what comes next.
And this is what's frustrating about this whole thing.
The Iranians are on the right side of history.
They have every justification for the stances they're taking, but the stance they're taking is positioning them, setting them up for a potentially fatal blow to be delivered by the United States.
And again, I'll point out that I firmly believe that if we do go to war against Iran, we will terminate the Iranian regime.
But the consequences of that action, just like terminating Saddam Hussein, were catastrophic, led to the Arab Spring, led to a destabilization of the region.
And if we take out the Iranian regime, what we'll find out in hindsight is the Iranian regime was one of the most effective stabilizing forces in the region, that they helped keep peace.
And by removing them, we'll just create anarchy and chaos and disorder, which will, by the way, result in the demise of Israel.
And you know from your own extraordinary expertise in this field, the American intelligence community knows, surely the Mossad must know, that the Iranians do not have a nuclear weapon, but Netanyahu and Trump will still rattle that saber.
The problem is, Judge, they don't have a weapon, but they're one week away from having a weapon, and that's unacceptable.
The Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty does not give you the ability to build up the capability just short of the weapon and then imply that you have the weapon.
When you sign the NPT as a non-nuclear weapon state, you commit to not pursuing nuclear weapons.
And today, we have a situation where Iran has installed some of the most advanced centrifuges in the world, and they have stockpiled 60% enriched uranium hexafluoride, which has no other use other than to be sitting there as a loaded gun against the head of the West.
Now, I know Iran is doing this because they say that this is deterrence.
But the fact of the matter is they're deterring nothing.
They're waving a red flag in the face of a mad bull who's going to charge.
You know, Iran, and it's not me saying this, Judge.
Their own leadership, Larajani, came out and said, if you attack us, we will go nuclear.
And we've had former foreign ministers, the current generals in the IRGC further quantify, saying that Iran has all the components of a nuclear bomb and they can assemble them within a week.
So that's the reality of the situation.
And it's a dangerous situation that Iran isn't helping at all by taking this hardline stance.
They have every right to take it.
They're justified.
No one's sitting here saying that Iran is wrong, but sometimes you can be right and still die.
And I'm afraid that's what Iran is doing, is setting itself up to where there will be a major military strike that Iran won't survive.
If Israel and the United States attack Iran, will China and Russia just sit back and watch?
Absolutely.
Look, if China and Russia were going to do anything, they'd be doing it now.
You'd have Russia knocking the door down with the United Nations, passing, you know, getting resolutions out there, creating hurdles for the United States to cross.
All Russia has done, come out a statement that said, if the United States attacks, it will lead to regional instability.
Well, that's a statement of the obvious.
But what is Russia doing diplomatically to prevent this?
And the answer is, at least overtly, nothing.
They signed a strategic framework agreement with Iran, which is not a treaty.
It was actually a mechanism that could lead to a resolution of this issue should Iran not double down on stupid.
And I don't mean to call the Iranians stupid, but I am.
Again, possessing the ability to produce a nuclear weapon within a week is not where you want to be at this point in time.
It doesn't, you know, people can say, well, they have every right to do this.
That doesn't matter.
What matters is that they've done it.
And now this poses an existential threat against Israel, who is, for better or for worse, probably worse, an ally of the United States.
And we're not going to allow this situation to go forward.
It's a very dangerous situation.
But if Russia wanted to stop this or were intent on stopping this, they'd be at the United Nations right now throwing resolutions out there, and so would the Chinese.
Does Donald Trump have any cards to play with Vladimir Putin?
None whatsoever.
It's a losing game.
Look, he does, I'm sorry, he does have one card, and that's the good faith card.
And what that would be is to take the cards and put them down and say, I'm not playing a game here.
I'm not trying to, you know, out-trump you and outbid you and all this.
I want peace.
And I recognize that you are the victor in a war that is categorized more accurately as an American war against Russia using Ukraine as a proxy.
So I understand that you have beat us.
And what I want to do is mitigate the impact of this defeat by getting you what you say you need, but maintaining sufficient infrastructure so that the United States is not a complete loser in this.
The good faith card, where we were serious about this.
I thought that was the card that Trump was going to be playing early on, especially when he sent Steve Witkoff over there and they met with Kirill Dmitriev.
They met with Vladimir Putin and they began this remarkable process of engagement that was unprecedented.
But the most recent rhetoric out of Washington, D.C. shows that Donald Trump's not serious at all about this.
He continues to coddle Zelensky, which he can't do.
He empowers Europe through his indecisiveness.
Rather than telling Europe to sit down and shut up, he continues to engage with them and allow them to bluff him into not taking the decisive action that he needs to take to bring this conflict to an end.
And Russia is aware of this.
The Russians are, of course, being very demure in their approach diplomatically.
But we look at the reality, we look at the statement of Putin, we look at the statement of Rebkov, and we look at the statement of others, Lavrov.
The Russians know darn well that the United States is not negotiating in good faith, and they are very clear-eyed about this and clear-eyed about the need to continue moving forward, not to hold out hopes of somehow an American economic revival of Russia.
They're saying, even if we get peace, we're not inviting these companies back in because we don't want to open the door to America being able to threaten us with sanctions, threaten to withhold.
We don't trust the Americans, nor should the Americans ever be trusted again, at least not under the current iteration of leadership.
Can Trump intimidate Putin?
He seems to think that he can.
I don't know.
I mean, no.
I was going to try and come up with some sort of facetious argument, but the answer is no.
Russia, you know, first of all, Trump wouldn't be the first president that's tried to intimidate Putin.
You know, George W. Bush, when he withdrew from the anti-ballistic missile treaty, was somehow saying, you know, we're going to build these missiles, but you don't need to worry about it.
And Putin went, no, we're not worried about it.
We're telling you what the consequences will be.
That if you do this, we're going to take actions that overcome whatever you think you're going to build.
Is that intimidating Putin?
Oh, it's Putin being very pragmatic and coming up with a response.
He did the same thing with Obama.
He made a mistake with Obama.
He actually negotiated in good faith for the new START treaty under the belief based upon Rose Gutmüller, I think her name is, the negotiator, her promise that the United States, while they couldn't incorporate anti-ballistic missile issues into the new START treaty because of the politics of the Senate, that if Russia would just get this thing done, we promised to go to the table and address the anti-ballistic missile issue.
And we lied, straight up lied.
Well, that's a lesson to Vladimir Putin, too.
You can't trust America.
We did the same thing on Minsk.
Biden promised Putin that we would put pressure on the French, the Germans, and the Ukrainians to implement Minsk.
He made that promise in June of 2021.
And while Blinken was supposed to be out doing that, Blinken instead was in Kiev secretly transferring Stinger missiles and javelin missiles for the war that we were planning.
We had no intention of implementing Minsk.
We were always planning on this proxy conflict.
The Russians know this.
So Putin isn't intimidated.
Putin has made responses.
Everything we've done, especially when we violate our word or violate the code, Russia has a response to.
You can't be intimidated when you are pragmatic, when you are informed, and when you have the capacity to respond effectively to anything the other side does.
It should be Trump who's intimidated by Putin.
That would be the smart thing, not to be intimidated and surrender, but to be intimidated and say, I need to get out of this card game.
Because we come back to the card analogy.
You're sitting at the table and you're looking at your chips going, man, if this thing goes on, I'm going to lose everything.
And I've got a wife and kids at home and a mortgage need to be paid.
Why don't I just fold my hand, take the chips and leave what I got so at least I don't lose everything?
And that's what he needs to do right now.
Trump is in a position of we're going to lose everything.
And what we need to do is stop this card game, stop this war, because Russia's going to win everything.
They've got every card.
It's going their way.
And Trump needs to do that, but he's not.
He should be smarter than this.
But he's surrounded, I think, by people who give him horrible, horrible advice.
Well, he's surrounded by Zionists and neocons.
Now, I don't know if they're still neocons.
I think in their hearts they are.
If you read that signal chat, you can tell that they are.
Was there a single voice raised about why are we killing these people?
No, it was all about process.
Yeah, there was no there.
I mean, look, I participated in Operation Desert Storm, which included the strategic air campaign against Iraq, and we blew the crap out of that country.
Excuse my language.
But I will tell you that every target we struck, there was definitely, because I was a participant, there was a moral argument that you had to be able to articulate the importance of this target and you had to understand what the consequences of striking this target were.
And then you need to articulate why this was proportional and why the military necessity outweighed the potential for innocent civilian life.
And many times when you couldn't make that argument, we didn't strike the target because we were in the business of defeating the Iraqi government, but we weren't in the business of deliberately slaughtering the Iraqi people.
This attack in Yemen, It showed a total callous indifference to the value of Yemeni life, 100% callous indifference.
And it's a shame.
It's a shameful moment because normally you'd expect in chats like this for the real side of a person to come out.
And if this is the real side of our leaders, America has much to be shamed about.
Has the United States recognized the Syrian regime?
And is it actually recognizing, if so, HTS, which is listed in the State Department as a terrorist organization?
I don't think we're there yet.
I think Tulsi Gabbard is out there ringing the bell against Islamic fundamentalism, Islamic extremism.
I don't necessarily buy into everything that's attached to that, but I think when you have the director of national intelligence coming down hard on Islam and Islamic extremism that you don't turn around and recognize the most extreme form of Islam as is manifested in Syria today.
But we're between Iraq and a hard place.
We created this demon and we created this demon for the purpose of overthrowing Bashar al-Assad.
But let this be a lesson to everybody who's talking about going into Iran and bringing down the regime the day after.
If you don't have a plan for the day after, the week after, the month after, a year after, and know where you want to go and know what the potential pitfalls will be and you're ready to overcome them, all that happens is chaos and anarchy and you make the situation even worse than it was.
There's no way today anybody can articulate that the situation in Syria as it currently exists brings more stability to the region than when Bashar al-Assad was the president of Syria.
Here's this goofy State Department spokesperson.
I don't remember if she's reading from her laptop if she was in the other clips or if she's speaking from her heart in her head.
But anyway, here she is on Syria three days ago.
Chris, number 17.
You're aware of the announcement on Saturday of the interim authorities of the, by the interim authorities of a transitional cabinet in Syria.
We recognize the struggles of the Syrian people who have suffered decades under despotic rule and oppression of the Assad regime.
And we hope this announcement represents a positive step for an inclusive and representative Syria.
However, Syria's interim authorities should fully renounce and suppress terrorism, exclude foreign terrorist fighters from any official roles, prevent Iran and its proxies from exploiting Syrian territory, take meaningful steps to verifiably destroy Assad's chemical weapons, assist in the recovery of U.S. and other citizens who have been disappeared in Syria,
and ensure the security and freedoms of Syria's religious and ethnic minorities.
The United States will continue to assess the interim authorities' behavior and determine our next step based on those actions.
And you mentioned about sanctions, any adjustment to U.S. policy towards Syria's interim authorities will be contingent on all of those steps being taken that I mentioned to you.
The chances of the Syrian government taking those steps meaningfully.
This is the equivalent of her getting up there and going, we will normalize relations with Russia if Vladimir Putin denounces the Russian language, denounces the Russian Orthodox Church, denounces Russia's victory during the Second World War, and agrees that May 9th, instead of being Victory Day, will be America's supremacy day over Russia.
Now, if you're willing to do all of that, we'll be able to work with you going forward.
That's about as realistic as what she said here.
It's ignorance personified.
What it means is that the United States, that we have no control over the situation, because all of the things that she stipulated there are a reflection of the fact that what's happening in Syria today is 100% chaos and anarchy, and that we have no say over what's happening.
So she's trying to superimpose conditions, which, if met, you know, would imply that America is in control.
But none of those are going to be met because I just want to remind your audience: this is al-Qaeda.
Okay.
These are the people, the ideology, the organization that attacked us on 9-11.
And she's actually talking about a potential where we can reform al-Qaeda.
The only reformation of al-Qaeda comes with a 7.62 bullet through the head.
There's no reforming al-Qaeda.
They're evil.
This is why we go after them.
They murdered thousands of Americans, and it's a horrific ideology that should be eradicated.
They are a rabid dog that needs to be shot.
That's not what she's saying, though.
She's implying that somehow we can do business with Al-Qaeda.
Well, I'm from New York.
No, you can't, and nor shall you ever.
Not as long as I have a breath.
I will never agree to making peace with Al-Qaeda.
Al-Qaeda will only be resolved when every one of them is dead or renounce their religion, their extreme religious beliefs, and they have been shown to be reformed.
Other than that, the only way to deal with them is to close with and destroy through firepower maneuver.
Scott Ritter, thank you, my dear friend.
Thanks for letting me go across the board on all this.
Your analysis is always so deeply appreciated.
All the best to you.
Thank you.
Chorus.
Wow, a great conversation.
Very, very thoughtful and very deep and much appreciated.
Coming up at three o'clock, hopefully another great conversation.
Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski, Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom.
Scott Ritter, a pleasure, my dear friend, no matter what we're talking about.
Thank you very much for your time.
So in your view and from your sources and analysis, who or what was behind the drone attacks that were visited upon Russia?
And is President or President Trump's denials that the United States knew about this at all credible?
This is a British operation, British design.
It conforms with the British plan of keeping Ukraine in the fight and taking the fight to Russia.
Remember, this was a plan that is supposedly a year and a half in the making.
So politically, we go back to the time of Joe Biden.
At that time, the United States was actively using 20 CIA bases.
Now, a base is a CIA center of operations focused on a particular activity.
So you could have a CIA base that trains people in unconventional warfare, a CIA base that does long-range reconnaissance, direct action, a CIA base that does drone warfare, other does explosives, agent handling, the whole thing.
But they had 20 bases, which means they're pretty much covering the gamut.
This is the CIA.
During the Vietnam War, we had 16 bases.
CIA-20 in Ukraine.
And so this British planning began when the CIA was very active in Ukraine, working for a commander-in-chief who had committed to the strategic defeat of Russia using the Ukraine conflict as a proxy.
So the CIA knew of this planning early on.
You don't carry out an operation of this complexity inside Russia unless you have long-term covert assets.
embedded in Russian society.
The British and the Americans both recruited significant numbers of people back in the 1990s during the downfall of the Soviet Union, the decade of chaos.
Russia hasn't cleaned them all out.
They're everywhere.
And the British provided some of these resources to enable the renting of a warehouse, getting trucks, configuring the trucks to specific technical specifications, bringing in the drones, providing explosives.
Where do you get the explosives?
You have to have an explosive cache someplace.
This was a British operation.
They planned it.
They executed it.
The Ukrainians were simply the, you know, the, provided the manpower.
The CIA knew about this.
Whether or not the CIA played an active role in this, there are some legal constraints that the CIA can't do certain things without executive permission, and they would have to get new executive permission, new finding or something by Trump.
And I don't believe Trump actually gave it to him, but the CIA was aware of it, and they didn't communicate it up the chain.
They may have provided some sort of passive assistance in this.
But this was an operation carried out, and this is the part that needs to scare everybody.
A nuclear power, Great Britain, empowered a non-nuclear state, Ukraine, to launch a preemptive strike using conventional weapons against Russia's strategic nuclear deterrence.
That violates at least two clauses of Russia's nuclear doctrine.
When you violate the nuclear doctrine on the conditions under which Russia will use nuclear weapons, that means that you are creating the conditions for a nuclear war.
Now, the British have taken the lead in saying that Russia is bluffing.
And one of the challenges that confronts Vladimir Putin today is if he doesn't respond decisively, then you sort of hardwire in the notion that Russia is bluffing.
Now, Trump and the Russians have released indications of what they talked about for an hour and 15 minutes, I guess, earlier this week.
The Ukrainians have put out their version of what they understand.
And in their version, Trump asked Putin not to use tactical nuclear weapons in response.
And Putin said he can't guarantee that outcome.
I don't believe that Russia will use nuclear weapons.
But the fact is Putin has to come up with, this is why this is taking so long, because the Russians have to come up with a retaliation that resets their doctrine.
They have to put the British on notice that the next time you do this, it's automatic.
London disappears.
What they're going to do has to be so severe.
The punishment delivered to the Ukrainians so outrageous.
And the rumor is now that they are even talking about that the guarantees they gave the United States, Great Britain, that Zelensky and the inner circle would be protected are gone.
Putin just called Zelensky a terrorist.
He called it a terrorist government.
And there's only one way you deal with terrorists in a terrorist government.
Of course, you're Donald Trump and you shake hands with him and do business with him.
But the traditional way of doing it is to kill them.
And I believe that's exactly what Putin is going to be doing in the coming days or weeks.
They're going to initiate a week-long campaign that's designed to take out the leadership of Ukraine and the strategic infrastructure of Ukraine, basically to turn Ukraine into the Stone Age without using nuclear weapons, but using weapon systems like Oreschnik that send a signal to Great Britain, NATO, and the United States that the next time Russia uses its strategic nuclear forces, it won't be with conventional warheads.
Might MI6 have set Zelensky up in order to get rid of him?
Well, I don't know.
I mean, it's possible, but what politician would say, hey, let's risk general thermonuclear warfare that kills us all to get rid of Zelensky or kill him.
If you're going to kill Zelensky, just kill him.
There's a million ways to make him die, make his plane crash.
Is it, I shouldn't say conceivable, is it feasible to understand, is it rational that John Ratcliffe, the head of the CIA and Tulsi Gabbard, the head of director of national intelligence, did not know about this, that rogue CIA agents participated in it or knew about it and kept it from going up the chain of command?
Well, let's put it this way.
First of all, Tulsi Gabbard is the director of national intelligence.
She's not the director of the CIA.
The CIA is not responsive to her.
She manages 17 intelligence agencies and she briefs the president.
But Tulsi Gabbard isn't in the CIA chain of command.
She can't issue an order and make CIA do things.
Ratcliffe is.
He's the director of the CIA.
But what we know, for instance, Gina Haspel was a former director of the CIA, hard-nosed woman.
I mean, she was London station chief.
That's one of the big ones.
If you got that on your resume, you're going up the chain of command.
She went all the way up.
Nicknamed Bloody Gina.
Bloody Gina, because, well, gosh, she ran a base.
Remember, we're talking about those bases?
Yeah, one of those ram was a torture place.
But anyway, back to what the CIA should have known and should have told the president.
Well, right.
But what I'm trying to say is Gina Haspel's no pushover.
She couldn't control Russia House.
She tried to.
She came in and said they're lying to us.
They're running operations that we can't control.
It's out of control.
She couldn't control Russia House.
What do you mean by Russia House?
Russia House is the part of the CIA director of operations that runs Moscow station and runs all the covert operations against Russia.
Russia House is the center of power when it comes to intelligence operations.
Back during the Cold War, Russia House was it.
It was the center of the universe.
Moscow station was the ultimate place you wanted to be.
I had some limited interaction with them when I was as a weapon.
They don't answer to CIA command.
They consider their operations to be so sensitive and so important to national security that they keep the people who know about them limited.
And sometimes they just don't tell people about it.
So yeah, Vladimir certainly knows this.
He knows about Russia House.
He knows how it works.
Does he believe, in your opinion, Donald Trump, when Trump says the U.S. didn't know about what happened to your country last weekend?
I believe that that was an honest state.
No, well, first of all, it's not that the U.S. didn't know.
Trump said, I didn't know.
He said, Trump didn't know.
He didn't say, the question wasn't, did the United States know?
The question was, did Trump right?
Somebody between the people who knew and Trump needs to be fired.
Let me put it this way.
It's 100% certainty that the CIA knew about this operation at inception and had been tracking this operation through implementation.
100% certainty that Russia House knew about this.
100%.
And they did not report it up to chain of command because they did not want it to stop.
They didn't want it to be stopped.
They wanted this to happen.
So the CIA, while they may not have been the trigger pullers, were definitely people watching what was happening and cheering them on.
And they didn't report it up to chain of command, knowing that had they done so under this administration, the plug would have been pulled.
So they are complicit in this.
Well, they absolutely are.
They're running a rogue foreign policy.
They're facilitating a rogue foreign policy, which could result in the deaths of millions of innocents.
But let's even broaden this more.
Lindsey Graham and Richard Blumenthal, two senators who have been actively conspiring against Donald Trump, flew to Kiev in the lead up to this.
They had intimate interactions with the Ukrainian government solely to create the scenario where they had a sanctions package waiting for the Russians to fumble at Istanbul.
They knew in advance that something was going to happen to the Russians that would cause the Russians either not to come to Istanbul or to carry out a provocation that the Ukrainians could use not to go and that they would come up with the sanctions and shove it down Trump's throat.
Now, this is sedition, Judge.
Sedition.
This is treasonous behavior.
This is a violation of the Logan Act.
Lindsey Graham has no authority whatsoever to negotiate on behalf of the United States on national security and foreign policy issues.
He is limited in scope and scale to advice and consent to the president of the United States, but not to negotiate on behalf of the United States in a manner which contradicts the policy direction taken by the president.
Lindsey Graham is a traitor to the American people.
Well, but Lindsey Graham is the president's golfing buddy who gets to whisper into his ear all the time.
Well, then, then, but now it comes down to this.
And this is the tough question that has to be Trump.
Hey, the ear whisperer, the golfer, the perfume princess who you seem to be so close to.
Did he tell you about this, Mr. Trump?
Did your best friend whisper in your ear and say, we're going to hurt Putin?
Is there anything in your mind, but that Graham and Senators Graham and Blumenthal knew about this?
They may not have known about drones leaving a truck.
That's a very sensitive technical thing.
They knew that something was in the works that was going to keep the Russians out.
The Ukrainians said, we got a plan to keep the Russians out of Istanbul so that you could trigger your sanctions.
Because Trump's whole thing was, if the Russians don't want to participate in this, then I won't be able to hold back the Senate.
And so the Senate went in there, coordinated with the Ukrainians, who said, we got this, boss.
We got this one.
So they conspired against the policy direction of President Trump.
That's sedition.
Is it incompetence on the part of Ratcliffe that people under him participated in this and he didn't know about it?
He must understand Russia House and he must know how to deal with them.
Otherwise, there is a branch of the CIA, which is truly deep state, which truly operates on its own, which truly takes taxpayer funds and engages in all kinds of behavior, lethal and surveillance, without the knowledge and consent of the president or their lawful superiors.
The problem is, Judge, there's a founding document dated back to 1947, NSC 10-2, which creates the special activities department within the CIA, and it's tasked with carrying out covert operations, deniable operations, meaning that they say right in the legislation that the CIA must construct these operations so that if they are uncovered, they are deniable to the United States.
This means that the CIA, by its very nature, goes so deep and restricts information flows so much that they can, from the standpoint of a covert operator, and I could tell you this with 100% certainty, CIA directors come and go.
Most CIA directors are political in nature.
They're not operators.
And so now I'm running this operation that's been going on for 10 years.
And I got a CIA director there.
And I look at him and say, I don't agree with his politics.
I don't agree with the president's politics.
We're going to continue to do this operation.
We're not telling anybody about anything.
And they've been doing that since they were founded.
The CIA is the deep state.
The only way you handle Russia House is to eliminate the CIA in totality and, frankly speaking, arrest most of the case officers out there because they're not good Americans.
These are liars, cheaters.
I was recruited by the special activities division of the CIA.
I remember one of my final interviews with the recruiter, was a very veteran guy, Vietnam, doing Honduras, door kicker out of Honduras, covert ops during the Gulf War.
And we were talking, he said, we really want you, we really like you.
But he said, the problem is you can't lie.
And he said, if you're going to work for us, you got to lie about everything.
You got to lie to your wife.
You got to lie to your friends.
You got to lie to your boss.
You got to learn to cheat the polygraph because you can't tell the polygraph half the stuff you're doing because you're going to go out there and you're going to be living a lie.
And he said, you're too honest.
Thank you for applying, but we can't take you.
The CIA is full of liars.
These are cheaters.
These are alcoholics.
These are drug users.
They're gangsters.
And when we dissolve the CIA, we've got to actually make sure we deal with these people properly or else they'll go out and do horrible things.
When you said earlier that this may have been perpetrated in order to cause Russia to abandon any negotiation posture, the Russian Foreign Ministry Special Envoy, Mr. Marashnik, said the same thing yesterday.
Chris cut number four.
This large-scale incident has Ukrainian roots.
Terrorist methods are internationally prohibited, but they're used at state level by Ukraine.
Kiev is fundamentally not satisfied with the dialogue being organized.
Therefore, immediately on the eve of the next round of negotiations, a whole series of terrorist acts was committed, which emphatically sought to force Russia to abandon negotiations.
But we do not consider it possible for us to take this kind of action because negotiations and military activities will be separated.
And as for terrorist actions, I think that their organizers will receive appropriate responses.
There will definitely be no forgiveness or backing down in this sense.
But their mission of forcing Russia to abandon negotiations by heavy pressure simply did not work out.
Wow.
Professor Doctorow reports that most Russian ambassadors have been recalled to Moscow.
That would lead me to believe that the response is going to be humongous if they want their ambassadors personally warned about it by Sergei Lavrov in the Russian foreign ministry.
This is a my understanding is that this is a week-long operation, a campaign that once it starts doesn't finish until all the objectives are met.
And the objectives are to turn out the lights in Ukraine, to destroy all critical infrastructure, and to eliminate the Zelensky government.
I think one of the things they haven't decided upon yet is whether they eliminate the parliament.
One of the things that the Ukraine that the Russians have been saying is that Zelensky is an illegitimate president and they won't deal with him, and that it's up to the speaker of the parliament to step up and take charge.
They could deal with that person because constitutionally that's the person who should be in charge of Ukraine today.
But because they are now labeling the parliament and many parliamentarians as terrorists, this is a very important word.
This is why, you know, in America, we throw that word around a lot and people just start rivaling.
But when the Russians use this word, there is gravitas behind this.
There's meaning the Russians, so the Russians' words matter.
If you are labeled a terrorist, you're going to die.
Simply put, you're going to die.
And they have just sentenced Zelensky to death on international TV.
That's the reality.
What happens to the parliament, I don't know.
But the Russians, I believe, are going to carry out a week-long operation that is going to be beyond anything you've ever seen.
And it will put the world on notice that you don't get to hit Russian strategic.
You wrote a book called Highway to Hell, which warns of the dangers of Armageddon.
Has this behavior perpetrated by MI6 and Ukrainian intel, condoned by the CIA, but not reported in your view to their superiors, brought us closer to nuclear Armageddon?
100%.
This is actually forecast in the book.
I mean, you know, every author wants to say, buy my book.
It's an essential book.
You know, it's up to you to buy it whether you want to or not.
I'm here to tell you right now that we are on the cusp of thermonuclear war.
When you have Trump, pro-Trump generals who go on Fox News and, you know, spout Keith Kellogg nonsense about Ukraine and Russia, suddenly coming on Fox News wide-eyed going, guys, this is really close to nuclear war.
They're waking up.
They understand what happened.
What happened is not a joke.
How would we respond if the Mexican cartel sent trucks loaded with drones to Whitman Air Force Base and struck our B-2 bomber force up to Minot, North Dakota, struck our B-52s and Barksdale hit our B-52s?
Our strategic, the air element of the nuclear triad, our strategic nuclear force, and they hit them with the idea of taking them out.
And then we find out that the Chinese and the North Koreans supported that.
Do you think we'd sit here and go, gosh, that's no, we take them off the face of the earth because it is existential in nature.
That's what happened, ladies and gentlemen.
The Ukrainians went after Russia's strategic nuclear deterrence backed by a nuclear power, Great Britain, and facilitated by another nuclear power, the United States.
And the Russians have every right to say that that is a preemptive strike, you know, the beginning of a series of actions that could lead to the United States of Great Britain launching a preemptive strike against Russia.
That's why it's dangerous, because how do you preempt preemption?
With preemption, meaning you just start firing your own stuff.
Guys, this is so dangerous.
I know people are like, Scott, you keep crying, Wolf, because it's a dangerous time we live in, guys.
We get lucky.
Just because we get lucky doesn't mean the threat didn't exist.
This is as real as it gets.
Look at the photograph of the bear bombers burned out.
Now close your eyes and imagine they're B-2 bombers at Whitman Air Force Base.
What the hell would you think you're going to do?
And what would you want the president to do?
And then be grateful that there's a guy named Vladimir Putin sitting in the Kremlin who isn't a vindictive, revengeful kind of guy who understands the consequences of his actions.
But be prepared because he will have to send a response that reestablishes Russia's red lines in their nuclear doctrine as a reality, not something that can be violated at will by a nation like Ukraine on behalf of the British.
Here's Sergei Rybakov, the deputy foreign minister, being asked if a nuclear option is on the table, Scott.
Cut number five.
We demand that both London and Washington react in a manner that will stop this cycle of escalation.
So how will Russia respond?
Are all options on the table or can you rule out a nuclear response?
This is a question to our military people and our supreme commander.
I am not in a position to speculate.
All options are on the table.
That's right.
Options are on the table.
That's right.
What is it about Vladimir Putin that Donald Trump and the American government seem not to understand or appreciate?
I actually think it's the other way around.
I think that Donald Trump, again, you're asking me to read between the lines of his social media posting, which is an incomplete representation of the conversation he had.
But when Trump says, I spoke with Putin and he spoke of a very strong response, and then Trump didn't say what he normally says.
If he does that, I'll threaten sanction.
Trump was like, yep.
And he just left that there.
That means he respects Putin.
He understands Putin.
He doesn't take Putin lightly, especially now, because I do believe that Trump was briefed by his people and Trump had a wake-up call.
I hope it's a similar wake-up call.
If you remember when Ronald Reagan got shot, he was in the hospital bed and he started reflecting.
Then ABC News came out with the program the day after.
And he watched that program because he was sort of stuck in a hospital bed.
And he turns to his advisors and said, is that real?
Is that something going to be?
He said, boss, it's going to be so much worse than that.
And he had an epiphany.
He went, we got to stop this.
And that's what turned Donald Trump around.
We began the process of nuclear disarmament.
I'm hoping that Donald Trump got a briefing from Tulsa Gabbard that said, hey, boss, they put their nuclear forces on alert and they're going to use them.
We came very close to Trump's like, how did this happen?
We didn't order this.
Boss, it's out of control.
The Brits are out of control.
The Ukrainians are out of control.
We may have elements here out of control.
I think that reading into Trump's statement there, he understands this is a very, very, very dangerous situation.
Can MI6 operate on its own or would Starmer have had to have authorized this or Starmer's Prime Minister Starmer's predecessor, Rishi Sunak?
Look at Sunak.
There's a video out of Starmer hitting the heavy bag.
I don't know if you've seen it.
No.
Is he a boxer?
No, no, he's the opposite of a boxer.
It's the most effeminate punching imaginable.
And the reason why I bring that up is not just to mock him, because I am mocking him, but to point out that Starmer's not a man.
And what I mean by a man is not somebody who, you know, there are people that can walk into a room, stare the room down, and say, if you cross me, I will have you executed in public, drawn and quartered, and that will be the end of you.
So when I ask you the following question, you better give me the honest answer or suffer the consequences.
And they go, what?
He means it.
I'm going to answer quick.
Or there's people walking in the room that, you know, we're going to be tough.
We're going to be strong.
And you're going, no, you're not.
And you just say, I don't respond, Rick Speed.
I'm not.
MI6 is a rogue operation.
Their agents are out there doing things that aren't being reported back.
They get a green light from one prime minister.
They carry over the next prime minister.
They should be reported back to them, but there's no follow-through.
And so the MI6 is doing things right now that are being directed more out of the Ministry of Defense side of the house, maybe some British deep state elements that advise prime ministers.
But have you ever seen that show, Minister-Minister?
It's a comedy about the British, yes, Prime Minister or yes, Mr. Yes, Minister.
Yes, Minister, and how they literally, the minister comes in and the state doesn't want to give him anything.
They're just like, yeah, you go off and play golf and drink tea and we'll do the business of government because ministers come and go.
And the British have a deep state, the civil service in there that run things and they don't report up the chain of command unless you have a strong leader.
A strong leader calls them in and tells them the truth.
I will kill you.
I will eviscerate you.
I will terminate you if you lie to me.
I'm going to ask you some very tough questions.
But Starmer's not that leader.
And I think that you have this operation going on that's just a rogue operation by a rogue agency.
But it's a British agency.
What we need to do as Americans is put the British on notice that if they don't bring their mad dogs under control, then we will terminate our relationship with them because what they did is put the American people's lives at risk.
Again, I want to tell your audience: you almost died two weeks ago and earlier this week because Russia had every right when the British helped the Ukrainians launch a drone attack to assassinate Vladimir Putin.
Had they succeeded, Russia would have used nuclear weapons.
And now, by launching this attack against Russia's strategic nuclear deterrence, Russia has every right to use nuclear weapons.
Fortunately, the restraint is there.
But the British think the Russians are bluffing.
The British think the Russians are bluffing.
I will tell you, I can't speak for the Russian government, but I know for a fact that when a phone call was made in September of last year from a Russian ambassador to American officials saying that if Biden signs off on a document that allows American attack on his missiles to strike deep inside Russia, the Russia response will not just be limited to Europe, Ukraine, but they will hit Washington, D.C.
And that's why Biden backed down.
The Russians aren't bluffing.
There's no bluff in the Russians.
And so the British think they are bluffing.
And we're the ones that get caught up in this.
Our very lives depend now on mad dogs and Englishmen.
I want to play a clip of an American mad dog, Steve Bannon, who agrees 100% with what you've been saying, particularly about the roles of Zelensky and Senator Graham.
Chris, cut number eight.
We can't have people over there telling the Ukrainians that we're going to back more.
What we're trying to do is calm this down.
What President Trump is trying to say is: look, look, we can't have Lindsey Graham and particularly Zelensky leading us into a third world war with a deep strike into Russia.
And Putin came back today and said, Hey, we're going to get to the bottom of this and we're going to see who's accountable in Ukraine and beyond.
And that was a message to the United States.
What he's doing over there right now is stirring it up.
He's giving Ukrainians false hope that we're there to support them on engaging Russia in a kinetic conflict.
And we are not.
Two things ought to happen: either cancel his passport and donate back in the country or put him in jail if he comes back.
And people better wake up to the fact that we're getting sucked into this war.
If the intelligence community actually did this, this is an act of war against Russia.
Did the American people vote to go to war with the Russian people?
That was my friend Chris Cuomo.
We cut out the questions because we just wanted you to hear Bannon's answers on the News Nation network.
But Steve makes some very good points.
100%.
I don't normally agree with everything Steve Bannon says.
Same here.
And when Chris presented it to me, he said, Judge, before you say no, please take a look at what he says.
It's dynamite.
No, I mean, on this, he's 100% correct.
100% correct.
And Just because, you know, in the end, he said, did the American people vote to go to war against the Russian people?
Judges, you know, on June 18th, we're going to hold a citizen summit where we're going to have a dialogue between the Russian people and the American people in Kingston, New York.
This is so important because the American people didn't vote to go to war against the Russian people.
And maybe it's time the American people start engaging the Russian people on a personal basis, an individual basis, to realize that they don't represent a threat against us and we don't represent a threat against them.
We have to do something to change the dynamic here in the United States so that Lindsey Graham and Richard Blumenbill don't feel empowered to run off and carry out acts of sedition against the president who seems to be clueless when it comes to what's going on around him.
Scott Ritter, you're on fire, my dear friend.
I mention again your book, Highway to Hell, for anybody that wants to OD on Scott Ritter.
I read the book and I wrote a blurb on it and I met sincerely, meant sincerely what I wrote.
But Scott, thank you very much for your personal integrity and personal courage and just outright knowledge of all this and your presentation to us today.
Over the top, my friend.
Thank you so much.
We look forward to seeing you next week.
Thanks for having me.
Everybody's writing.
Ritter's on fire.
Ritter's on fire.
Yes, Ritter's on fire.
Thank you, Scott.
All the best.
And coming up, talking about fire at two o'clock this afternoon, if we can wake him up, Max Blumenthal, only kidding, at three o'clock, Professor John Mearsheimer.
At four o'clock, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson at 4:30.
I'm not sure where he is on the planet.
Pepe Escobar, Justin Apolitano for Judging Freedom.
Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
Today is Friday, August 1st, 2025.
Welcome to the special edition of Judging Freedom with my dear friend and colleague, Scott Ritter.
Scott, thank you for the double duty this week.
There's no better person on the planet for us to turn, literally for us to turn to to explain the dangers, the significance, and the idiocy behind what President Trump ordered today.
What did he announce that he did today and what did he order?
And what is the significance of it?
What did the president do today?
Well, what the president did today is deploy two of the most lethal strategic nuclear assets in the American arsenal, or at least he claims to deploy it.
I think we will touch upon this later.
Ohio-class submarine launched ballistic missile capable submarines armed with trident nuclear or solid-fuel missiles, each one tipped with multiple thermonuclear warheads.
He has said that he has ordered them deployed into the appropriate areas in response to a Russian tweet from Dmitry Medvedev.
This means areas where the submarines' missiles can target Russia.
This is extraordinarily dangerous.
The United States maintains a permanent force of Ohio-class submarines on station, two submarines at least in each of the oceans, two in the Atlantic, two in the Pacific.
They're on station where their missiles could reach any of the potential nuclear threats to the United States of America.
On occasion, we deploy additional Ohio-class submarines.
For instance, just recently, an Ohio-class submarine was deployed into the Indian Ocean close to Iran, where its Trident missiles armed with W76-2 low-yield nuclear weapons could be used against Iran if the president so ordered.
But we have four nuclear-armed submarines.
So when he said he's ordered two deployed, is he talking about two additional submarines to this?
Or is he talking about redeploying two submarines out of their existing stations into new deployment areas that make them even more of a threat to Russia?
See, the tweet he's responding to is one from Dmitry Medvedev, in which Medvedev sort of mocked the president as Medvedev.
Medvedev is the former president of Russia, who's the number two person on their National Security Council, who in recent years has been more publicly bellicose than President Putin.
He's like the bad cop to Putin's good cop.
And what did he do?
Pick a social media fight with Trump and Trump took the bait?
Mean tweets.
This is literally mean tweets.
This is about Donald Trump threatening to end the world as we know it because of a mean tweet.
But what's even more outrageous is that Donald Trump doesn't understand what Medvedev tweeted.
Medvedev was telling Trump to knock it off with the dangerous threats, saying that, you know, if you do this, America can end up looking like the walking dead because of the dead hand.
The dead hand is a reference to the perimeter system, which is a defensive system put in place by the Soviet Union back in the 1980s, so that if they are ever struck preemptively by the United States, a first strike, by the way, the tactic to be used in a first strike is to bring Ohio-class submarines close to Russia's shores, fire off their Trident missiles on a flattened trajectory to avoid detection so you can strike the targets quicker,
which is what Trump just actually appeared to order the U.S. Navy to do.
So the dead hand now becomes a factor because if Trump is dumb enough to launch an attack against Russia, the dead hand, the perimeter system, will ensure that all of Russia's strategic nuclear forces will be fired against the United States, even if Trump takes out Putin, the National Command Authority, etc.
I know this is a fact.
When I was a weapons inspector in Vodkinsk, there was a missile crisis in March of 1990 because the Russians were trying to get three missiles out of the factory without us turning on the cargo scan X-ray system.
Why?
These weren't three SS-25 missiles.
They don't care if we see those.
These were three of what they call Syrina.
These are modified SS-25s, not to carry nuclear warheads, but to carry the radio equipment that's used to broadcast the codes.
They needed to get these missiles out and deployed and ready so that the perimeter system was alive and well and living.
The dead hand is only defensive in nature.
Trump should feel no threat from this unless he's planning on attacking Russia.
This is the insanity.
This president doesn't even know what he's doing.
And he's responding to a mean tweet from a guy who's been me tweeting for years now.
I mean, I think most people view Dmitry Medvedev's tweets with sort of humor.
Yeah, they hurt sometimes.
He's very good at what he does.
But he's not the president of Russia.
He doesn't command Russia's military nuclear forces.
He doesn't direct the Russian economy.
He advises Vladimir Putin, but he is not Vladimir Putin.
So to treat Medvedev as if his tweets actually will translate into action is childish behavior, but in this case, dangerously childish because he's literally putting two U.S. nuclear submarines on a combat patrol against Russia.
Let's read exactly what Trump said.
Chris has prepared a full screen.
This is from his social, his truth social.
Based on the highly provocative statements of the former president of Russia, Dmitry Medvedev, who is now the deputy chairman of the Security Council of the Russian Federation, I have ordered two nuclear submarines to be positioned in the appropriate regions, just in case these foolish and inflammatory statements are more than just that.
Words are very important and can often lead to unintended consequences.
I hope this will not be one of those instances.
Thank you for your attention to this matter exclamation point.
Would Hegseth understand what you just explained about the power of these and how the Russians would perceive the threat?
Would Pete Hegseth know that we already have four underwater and are we adding two more?
Do we have two more to add or has he just repositioned two of the four that are already somewhere in the seas?
I think we have 14 Ohio-class submarines.
I mean, somebody can correct me if I'm wrong, but I think it's 14.
And they go through a rotation.
You know, first of all, those four submarines that are out there, it's a minimum of four, two in each ocean.
You know, they go through rotations.
And so they'll rotate back to their home port for refitting.
The crews have to go out.
There are some that are cycling through long-term refueling and refurbishment.
So you don't have 14 able to be deployed at any one time.
I think you probably have somewhere in the area of, you know, six to nine Ohio-class submarines available for deployment.
You'll have the four out in the fleet, out in the field.
You'll have two that are getting ready to come out and replace two of the four.
And then you have surge capacity.
Like I said, sometimes they send an additional submarine out to the Indian Ocean.
Other times they may choose to put three submarines in each of the deployment areas, depending on what the world situation is.
But this is a standard operating procedure, something that Pete Hegseth should be cognizant of now that he's the Secretary of Defense.
He should have been briefed on this by the Commanding General of Strategic Command, whose job it is to run these submarines.
The other thing that we never announced the movement Ohio-class submarines.
I'm just going to ask you, what is to be gained by making an announcement like this?
Is he just trying to cause Putin sleepless nights?
Well, I don't think Putin's going to cause sleep.
But to make this announcement, first of all, it's foolish, because all you're doing is giving credence to the legitimacy of the dead hand.
I mean, the dead hand, again, only exists.
It only becomes viable if the United States launches a preemptive nuclear strike against Russia.
And redeploying Ohio-class submarines close to Russia's shores indicates that that's what you're doing.
So, you know, the Russians are going to be doing something in return.
This is where it gets stupid because now they have to do something in return.
Hopefully they don't announce it and make a big deal of it, but they do it in a way that we detect it and we know what they've done.
But the other thing is, let's say I'm an Ohio-class submarine commander, a captain, and I'm out there just minding my own business.
And all of a sudden, I'm told that the president is redirecting my submarine to a new deployment area, maybe even telling me to target my warheads.
I mean, we don't know.
All the warheads should have been detargeted a long time ago because we don't want inadvertent launch.
But what did the president now say?
Not only are we redeploying them, but you're now going to have a Russian city targeted each one of these warheads.
Who knows what's going through this man's head?
But the president did this publicly.
So now I'm the Russians.
And I go, okay, guys, start looking for an Ohio-class submarine moving because when an Ohio-class submarine is on station, it's sitting at the bottom of the damn ocean and it ain't moving.
It's avoiding detection altogether.
You don't want to be moving this submarine because it can become detected.
Now, if I'm the Russians, I'm looking for this thing.
The Russians have some very good submarines.
And if they locate it and trail it, now they'll follow it to its new deployment area.
And if it makes a threatening move, the Russians will sink it immediately.
I mean, this is how dangerous this is.
He has put the lives of 19-year-old sailors at risk, as well as senior, everybody on these subs.
Oh, yeah, there's not too many 19-year-olds on that submarine because nuclear submarines require people that have to go through some good training.
But you got some 20, 21-year-olds.
You got a lot of 30-year-olds.
You got a lot of 40-year-old men with families and kids.
You know, this is insanity.
These are America's most capable warriors who we never want to, we don't ever want these guys to go into combat.
They're there for nuclear deterrence.
They're there to deter an enemy from carrying out an attack against the United States.
Now the president has put them in a place where they're not doing deterrence, but they have now become the perceived aggressors.
This is insanity in the extreme.
Pete Hegseth should be the chairman of the Joint Chiefs should be screaming his head off.
I mean, J.D. Van should be saying, Mr. President, no.
But what we get, Lindsey Graham, the perfume princess out there having an orgasmic response to the president's toughness, you know, telling his friends, the Russian people, Lindsey Graham isn't friends with anybody in Russia.
I can tell you, nobody in Russia is friends with Lindsey Graham.
But, you know, this is ridiculous.
I apologize for the sexual reference there.
That was inappropriate.
But, you know, you just take a look at the way this man's responding to these, this, this dangerous absurdity on the part of the president.
It's idiotic.
This is going to raise your blood pressure even more.
Rather than cautioning the president, my former Fox News colleague, who now runs the Pentagon, has reposted on his own X account President Trump's nuclear post that I just read to you.
There it is.
On Pete Hegseth's official account, he reposted what Donald Trump said.
So these guys are enablers, Scott.
But I got to ask you something that I think is going to make this worse.
Is it true that within the past several weeks, the United States delivered nuclear armaments to Great Britain?
And if so, what did we send there?
Well, it appears to be true.
I mean, I can't confirm it, meaning I haven't seen the deployment order and I haven't seen the miss, but I've read the media reports and all indications are that we have delivered B6112 gravity bombs.
These are the basically it's the same weapon system that we have deployed throughout NATO, part of the NATO nuclear deterrence.
We've now deployed these to Great Britain, to air bases there, which means that we now have a nuclear deterrence outside of the NATO hierarchy.
That's what's interesting here, because in order for Great Britain to receive American nuclear weapons under the NATO umbrella, you have to invoke the NATO nuclear advisory council and all this.
There has to be discussion and things of this nature.
This is a unilateral deployment of the United States to Great Britain, which implies that this is about the United States and Great Britain posturing as opposed to the United States strengthening NATO's nuclear deterrence.
This is at a time when Great Britain just did the Northwoods Declaration with France, where they've combined the nuclear doctrines of France and Great Britain as an independent outside of NATO nuclear capability.
This is when Great Britain has extended its nuclear umbrella into Poland, and now the United States is attaching its nuclear force to the British.
I mean, we are literally, people look at all this stuff and they're like, you know, oh, that's not a big deal.
Let's not blow this out of proportion.
If you go back and read Barbara Truckman's fantastic book, The Guns of August, it's about to lead up to August 1914, the beginning of World War I, especially in the month of July, all the things that were happening, the people went, yeah, but it's just mobilization.
Yeah, we're just doing this.
No, there will never be a war.
Nobody wants a war.
And then, boom, World War I. Right now, moves are being made right now that if they're not stopped and reversed, are going to lead to a general nuclear exchange between the United States and Russia.
This is the direction we're heading.
And I want to remind your audience that the CIA said last year there's a greater than 50% chance that there will be a nuclear war between the United States and Russia during the last months of the Biden administration.
What the Biden administration was doing, as provocative as it was, pales in comparison to what this administration is doing.
We're above 50% right now, Judge.
We're heading into extraordinarily dangerous territory.
What do you think is going on in the Kremlin as we speak as a result of all of this?
Dismay.
Dismay.
I mean, first of all, the Kremlin right now, I believe, is trying to bring an end to the Ukraine conflict without creating an even greater conflict.
And so this is always a delicate diplomatic balancing game.
And then you have this president making threats.
I mean, we still have the August 8th deadline coming up, the 10 days expires.
What's going to happen on August 8th?
Steve Witkoff flying to Moscow to meet with his Russian counterparts.
Are threats going to be issued?
And now in that environment where we're supposed to be actually trying to calm each other down, the president deploys two nuclear submarines in response to a mean treat from Dmitry Medvedev.
The good news here, and I know I'm going to get in trouble here from people, but thank God there's one mature, responsible adult in the room, and that's Vladimir Putin.
Is he perfect?
No.
Does he walk on water?
No.
But I'll tell you what, he doesn't do any of the garbage that Trump's doing.
And I believe Putin will do that which is necessary to ensure Russia's security interests without being provocative.
If you saw his discussion today about Ukraine, very level-headed, saying the door's open for peace.
Don't blame us.
It's Ukraine saying they don't want peace.
It's the United States that's doing the, we're ready for it, but there are realistic conditions that have to be met.
You know, trying to just calm things down, lower the temperature.
And I think he's going to continue this way.
This man is not suicidal.
He didn't spend a quarter of a century getting Russia out of the ashes to where Russia is today, this nation where Russians are actually proud of who they are and what they are and what they've become.
He didn't do all this just to throw it away in a blinding flash of nuclear insanity.
And I think that was what was behind Dmitry Medvedev's mean tweet.
What he was telling the president of the United States is, calm down, take a chill pill, because the things you're talking about, the way you're talking, can only end with a nuclear apocalypse.
And if you think for a moment that you can preemptively strike our leadership because we're not playing the game in Ukraine the way you want to play, we have the dead hand and the dead hand will take you out.
That's not provocative.
That's just a statement of fact.
And, you know, hey, Tulsi, if you're watching, talk to the guy, brief him on the perimeter system, brief him on the dead hand.
And if you need help, call me.
I'll come in and back you up.
But this guy needs to have some hard facts put on the table in front of him.
I don't think he listens to anybody.
Tulsi Gabbard is the only one that will tell him what he doesn't want to hear, but the others are all yes men around him.
However, Pete Hacksick retweeted.
That's the biggest indication of syncrepency that you can come up with.
Correct, correct.
President Putin did release a statement, very brief, to the point, and manifesting what you said, the adult in the room.
All disappointments arise from excessive expectations.
In order to have a peaceful resolution, it is necessary to have substantive conversations and not in public.
He gets it.
He gets it that Donald Trump is just bravado on steroids.
Yeah.
And well, the other thing is public posturing like this boxes you into a corner.
I mean, what is the masculine statement that he's trying to make by deploying these nuclear submarines?
Because this is alpha dog territory here.
So now that you've done it, do you back away?
Do you back off?
Do you pretend you didn't do it?
Do you admit you were wrong?
Not no.
Once you've gone alpha dog mode, you're sitting there with your chest pumped out.
You know, hey, I got all things.
And then what?
Is there going to be an additional escalation on this part?
President Putin is 100% correct.
The place for these discussions is behind the scenes.
So you don't box yourself into a corner.
So there's room to maneuver.
You know, it's diplomacy 101.
And, you know, even a simple Marine like me knows this, that sometimes it's best not to go public with things and you handle it behind closed doors.
And then when you finally reach agreement, as difficult as that process might be, you come out and put on a common smiley face, shake hands, and everything's good.
The world doesn't need to know what your disagreements are.
They only need to know that you actually worked through them and came to an inventional agreement that makes the world a safer place to be.
I'll leave you, not leave you, but I'll say this.
On July 29th, President Trump, in responding to a question from a task correspondent talking about the New Star Treaty, which is the last strategic nuclear arms agreement in play between the United States and Russia, said that's an agreement that cannot be allowed to expire.
It expires on 4 February, 2026.
That's the most sane thing this man has said.
So hopefully there's a modicum of sanity in that brain of his so that he understands the danger of nuclear weapons.
He appears to understand that, the necessity of avoiding an arms race, he appears to understand that.
And hopefully we can get through these turbulent times and get on to doing what needs to be done, like extending the New Star Treaty.
The Russian people are referring to Trump by a certain word.
What is that word?
Oh, dear.
It's a word I'm not supposed to use.
It's not a foul word, but it's not a nice word.
Durak means fool.
It means idiot.
It's not meant in a kind way.
And if you call someone a Durak, it is a debasing term.
It means you're literally an idiot.
You're stupid.
You're dumber than belief.
I use the word today in describing President Trump.
And I used the Russian variant because I just happened to believe that the 150-plus million Russians who looked at this, that's probably the first word that came to their mind, Durak.
What an idiot.
What a fool.
Because there's no justification for his actions.
There's no legitimate trigger for this.
It's as foolish and idiotic as it gets.
What is American Intel doing now in response to what Trump announced?
Well, I mean, what it should be doing right now is monitoring Russian strategic nuclear forces, looking for any alteration in alert status, you know, counting Russian submarines.
The Russians just deployed a brand new submarine, the biggest submarine in the world.
It carries 96 nuclear warheads on it.
I can't remember how many RS-56 Bulovo missiles, but the most more modern than the Trident missile.
96 of them.
It's out there right now on station.
American intelligence trying to find out where that submarine is, trying to look at the operational status of the mobile missiles, the SS-27s that are out there.
Are they in garrison?
Had they been put out into the Siberian forests?
What's the alert status of the other missiles in their silos?
Because what Trump did is begin.
Unfortunately, he began the process of the mobilization of nuclear forces that, if left unchecked, will lead to an inevitable nuclear.
I just, again, I want to come to the point.
Last fall, we were over 50% chance of a nuclear war.
We were very lucky to avoid it.
Right now, that percentage is higher.
It's an extraordinarily dangerous situation that even though I sort of chuckle when I talk about the word Durak, it's only because the situation is so damn dangerous that you have to laugh.
It's like, you know, we're going to die.
What can you do?
Cry or laugh?
And we're going to die unless something changes.
This is it.
There won't be historians able to write this history because they'll all be dead.
But if they were, this will be one of those moments that a person like Barbara Tookman would be talking about in the future Guns of August book that would have been written if anybody lived.
But we're talking about thermonuclear war here, global thermonuclear war.
There won't be survivors.
Wow.
How destructive can these submarines be if they were to attack under the radar or under the defensive systems at Moscow?
We're talking about Hiroshima and Nagasaki-type destruction or greater?
Oh, good Lord, greater.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were 12 kilotons, under 20 kilotons of destructive power.
Very, I mean, destructive, no doubt about it.
Our cities would be hit with 150 kilotons, 300 kilotons, one megaton.
That's 1,000.
We're literally talking.
I did a public briefing last December at the National Press Center where I invited Theodore Postal to come in and give a presentation about what a single Russian nuclear warhead over Washington does.
This is the brilliant and fearless MIT physicist.
Yeah, and good man.
And you look at this briefing and it just terrifies you.
And that's just one.
Understand that when you do nuclear targeting, you're putting at least two warheads on each target just to ensure if you're hitting a national capital center, I can say this during the Cold War, Moscow was targeted by about 60 warheads that just overkill to make sure we got everything.
And so the Russians will be doing the same thing.
Will be nothing left alive in Washington, D.C. Read Annie Jacobson's book, Nuclear War.
She run through a very realistic scenario.
And it's over.
And you don't want to survive this.
If there's a nuclear war, you want to die.
You want to be one of the ones who turns into dust immediately because to live isn't to live.
To live is to die.
Rear Admiral Buchanan, who is the director of plans for strategic command, gave a lecture last November in Washington, D.C.
And after he acknowledged that the Biden administration is ready to have a nuclear exchange with Russia, we're ready to have a nuclear war with Russia and we're going to win.
This is what he said.
He then said, we probably should be more honest with the American public about what this means and what victory means.
Because he said, even when we win, life will never be the same for any American.
There won't be civil liberties.
We'll be living under permanent martial law.
You're not going to have electricity, running water, medicine, none of the niceties of civilization that you currently enjoy will exist.
And that's winning a nuclear war.
Ladies and gentlemen, you don't want to win a nuclear war.
You just want to die because to win means you're going to be suffering.
And if you're a parent with kids, who the hell wants that for their children?
This is why people have to become angry about this and mobilized about this.
People should be calling up their representatives in Congress and saying, what the hell are you doing?
People should be demanding that Lindsey Graham, the perfume princess, get booted out of the Senate.
This is the man who is almost singularly responsible for this very crisis because of his asinine performances, because of his Russophobia.
This is why I do what I do, to combat Russophobia.
So the people, when they hear the lunacy out of people like Lindsey Graham, out of Donald Trump and others, they go, no, that's not real.
That's not the Russia.
We're not buying into this crap.
But it's an uphill battle right now.
But people need to understand, we're talking about you're going to die.
Your kids are going to die.
And if they don't die, they're going to suffer like you've never seen people suffer before.
No parent wants to see that or experience that.
So let's nip this thing in the bud.
Let's let Donald Trump, let's let Peak Hed Seth, let's let Lindsey Graham and everybody else know that this is not okay.
This is not good.
You don't deploy two Ohio-class nuclear submarines because of a mean tweet.
Get real.
Become an adult.
Become the leader that everybody expected you to be.
A mean tweet sent two of the most powerful assets of the United States into an operational status.
This is insanity, literal insanity.
Scotty, I know you have to go, so I will let you go.
Thank you very much for all this.
You warned about all this in your book, Highway to Hell.
I just want to say that.
I mean, that's why I read a book, Judge.
You did.
I read the book.
I was privileged to write a blurb for it.
It's all in there.
It predicted what's happening right now.
Scotty, I know you got to go.
Thank you very much.
Have a great weekend.
We'll see you Monday or early next week.
Okay, Judge.
Thanks a lot.
Thank you.
Wow.
And of course, everybody should have a nice weekend.
God only knows what will happen.
Monday, all of your regulars will be with us.
Alistair Crook at 8 in the morning, Ray McGovern at 10, Larry Johnson at 11:30, and probably Scott Ritter to bring us up to date.
And God only knows what will happen over the weekend.
Thank you for watching this special edition of Judging Freedom.
Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom.
A woman by the name of Deborah Lipstadt,
who is the State Department envoy to combat anti-Semitism.
And she was speaking at the something called the Israeli American Council, a pro-Netanyahu lobbying group funded by Miriam Adelson.
I think you'll be scandalized by what she said, cut number six.
After October 7th, there was a feeling around the world that Israel is weaker.
And you want to beeper?
I can give you a few.
That's the act.
It's required in the State Department to mock mass slaughter and a war crime.
She should be fired.
That's instant termination.
Literal instant termination.
I can guarantee you that the State Department didn't give her permission to make that statement.
I can guarantee it because the State Department knows that what happened in Israel is an act, what Israel did was an act of terrorism.
So the State Department has sought to avoid this.
You've seen smirking Mr. Miller and his lackeys up there.
They just won't even address the issue.
They pretend it didn't happen.
We're going to investigate it.
We're going to do this, but they're never going to commit to it because they can't commit to it.
She just committed the unpardonable sin of legitimizing what the Israelis did with a stupid, stupid comment.
That's instant termination, but she can't be terminated because the Israeli lobby will never let her be terminated.
But that is disqualifying as a diplomat.
It's disqualifying in terms of just being a moral human being.
She should be liquidated from civil society, meaning that wherever she goes, she should never again be given an opportunity to speak or represent anything.
She has disqualified herself as a human being.
I'm not talking about doing violence to her.
I would never do that, but she should never be allowed to represent the United States of America ever again.
These weapons are available and on full alert status.
What does that mean, Scott, on full alert status?
It means they're ready to fire right now.
And they're not nuclear.
That's the point I'm trying to make here.
The weapons that Russia would use against Ukraine in a situation where they have made the decision to take the government of Ukraine out, to take Kiev, the government sector out, are non-nuclear in nature.
They're strategic weapons.
It's called the avant-garde.
It's a hypersonic warhead that's loaded on to strategic missiles.
Old SS-19s, the Sarmat, the new heavy missile, the Yars mobile missile.
They all have regiments that are equipped with conventionally armed avant-gardes.
These will hit at 26 impact on the ground, at 26 times the speed of sound.
That's the equivalent of 26-ton bomb.
All right.
We've seen what happens when a 1.5-ton or a three-ton bomb goes off.
This will be a 26-ton bomb coming in, hypersonic speed.
It will take out entire blocks.
And all Russia has to do is sprinkle Kiev with a half dozen of them, and the city ceases to exist.
Remind you, they can also do that to Brussels, to NATO headquarters.
They can do that to the British.
They can do that to anybody.
These aren't nuclear weapons.
And when they do this, the impact will be so devastating, it'll have a nuclear-like impact on the psychology of the West.
And there's the danger.
And this is where I would, if I were advising Lab Rob, say, I understand your capabilities and I understand what you can do, but you need to understand what that would trigger.
And I do think he knows what it would trigger, which is why he keeps saying, we don't want to do this.
You know, JD Vance, You know, he was a Marine, but he was a corporal and he was a combat correspondent who didn't see that much combat.
He doesn't know that which he talks about.
This is literally the voice of one of the more ignorant people in America about military operations.
And he's speaking about Iran, a country he doesn't understand.
He thinks he's saying things that play well.
He should probably have checked with Donald Trump first because, you know, Donald Trump ordered the assassination of Qasim Soleimani as an act of retribution for the American perception that Soleimani was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Americans during the American occupation of Iraq and the Iranian support to the resistance.
But JD Vance should also ask Donald Trump what it felt like to be in the White House as the Iranians signaled that they're going to fire 10 to 12 ballistic missiles against the Al-Ansar-Assad air base in Iraq.
These missiles hit the targets they were looking for with pinpoint precision, and there wasn't anything the United States could do to stop it.
And it intimidated Donald Trump to the point where we carried out no further actions.
That's the reality of Iran, and that's what JD Vance is going to have to be briefed on.
He really needs to keep his mouth shut about issues pertaining to national security that, frankly speaking, he won't play a part in.
He's going to be the vice president of Donald Trump, a man who consolidates all political power into his person and will not consult with the vice president or frankly anybody else when it comes to issues of this nature.
The CCD, the Centers for Disease Control, and information terrorism in America.
What the hell is information terrorism from the perspective of the deep state in Atlanta, the CCD?
Well, apparently, if you voice an opinion that counters their official narrative, you're an information terrorist.
I mean, that's what we're talking about here.
Dissent has become terrorism.
What we normally expect in America, which is civil debate, discussion, and dialogue about difficult issues.
That's how we improve ourselves as a democracy.
We sit down and have a free exchange of ideas.
But when you have a narrative put out by the government or a government agency, that narrative can't be questioned.
And if you question it, then you're not an American citizen doing what American citizens should do.
You are the problem.
And we tend to define the problem in terms that grossly exaggerate things, such as information terrorists.
We need to understand that the United States government is waging information warfare against we, the people of the United States.
Their job is to manipulate data, to shape perceptions, to do anything other than to have a fact-based, honest discussion about difficult issues.
Are we in danger of the American government declaring people like you or me or RFK Jr. information terrorists because we dissent on something like the vaccine?
I know that the United States has made it impossible for us to have a fact-based discussion about the experiments because they've taken the records and for 75 years we can't talk about it.
I know that anybody who raises the issue gets silenced.
It gets deplatformed.
Deplatforming is a tactic used by the U.S. government directly, more likely indirectly.
We know that the FBI has in the past, and maybe continues to have interaction with various social media outlets where they are instructed to shut down people who are talking.
Oh, Scott, four federal judges in Texas, one at the district court level and three at the Court of Appeals level, have examined the discovery in a major lawsuit brought there by state attorneys general against Facebook.
And the evidence is crystal clear.
I mean, there's an email from Nick Clegg.
You remember him?
He was deputy prime minister to Great Britain.
He's now a mucky muck at Facebook or whatever Facebook calls itself these days, complaining bitterly to Mark Zuckerberg.
Get these guys off my back.
Get the White House off my back.
Get the FBI off my back.
We've got to take this stuff down.
These guys are driving me crazy.
There's no question that the government is attempting to do indirectly what the First Amendment unambiguously prohibits it from doing directly, which is abridging speech because of its content.
We're talking about the government suppressing speech because it hates it, fears it, or disagrees with it, which is the exact thing the First Amendment was written to prevent from doing.
My guest on Judging Freedom was Jack Devine, whom I think you know, Leifer in the CIA, now retired.
And at the time of his retirement, he was very senior management.
Here's his comments on the condition of the Russian military.
They will lose.
They cannot win.
He's actually, it's not that he can't sustain against an insurgency like they tried in Afghanistan.
He can't win the traditional part of it.
He can't even get control over before it starts to crumble.
It crumbled when he went across.
I didn't realize the poor condition of his military forces, their training, their leadership, communications, and the state of their equipment.
Your response.
Do they make mistakes?
Yes.
Have they made mistakes?
Yes.
But the notion that they fell apart the moment they took over 20% of Ukraine.
So the idea that somehow they lost is absurd.
Have they since vacated or exited, whatever the military term is, a noteworthy portion of what they took over?
Absolutely.
They traded space for time.
We've had this conversation.
They went in with too few resources.
They tried to do too much with too little.
That's changing right now.
Ask Mr. Devine how the Ukrainian power grid's looking right about now.
Ask him how the Ukrainian future for the winter is looking.
Ask him what's happening to the vaunted Ukrainian armored corps built by NATO right now in Karazzo.
Ask him what the casualty ratio is right now in Karazzo.
Ask him what the future of Karazon is in the coming month.
Ukraine's getting weaker.
NATO's becoming more fracked.
Game.
Marco Rubio is a bigger traitor to Donald Trump and Donald Trump's policies than Mike Pompeo was.
It is Marco Rubio that has sunk the Russia policy, and he's sinking the Iran policy.
He's preventing Trump from achieving the policies.
When I say prevent Trump, it's because Trump is ultimately at the end of the day, a very weak and insecure man who doesn't have what it takes to stand up, look people in the eye, and say, you're fired.
And that's what he needs to do to Marco Rubio right now.
Fire him, terminate his existence.
But he took $100 million from Edelman's widow.
And, you know, gosh, he surrounded himself with the wrong people.
But Donald Trump, this is why he's failing right now, because of Marco Rubio.
And Marco Rubio is behind Mike Waltz being kicked out.
Does Donald Trump understand what's at stake in the special military operation in Ukraine?
No, I don't think Donald Trump, I don't think Donald Trump can spell Russia, let alone understand the complexities of Russia.
He certainly doesn't understand Ukraine because he's a schizophrenic when it comes to Zelensky.
One minute he rightly calls him out as this irresponsible dictator.
The next minute he speaks about him as if he's the legitimate leader of a viable nation state.
He doesn't know how to deal with NATO or Europe.
He's all over the place.
And one of the reasons is because of the conflicting guidance he's getting from his national security team, led by Marco Rubio, who continues to sell, you know, Europe is a viable ally.
Europe is not our ally.
Why did Progozin turn around?
What do you think was behind all this, Scott?
The first thing we have to acknowledge is it was an armed insurrection.
Wagner, under arms, revolted against government rule.
Now, Progozhin will say, I did it because I'm anti-Shoigu, anti-Garasimov.
I mean, just imagine if an American mercenary group, let's say Blackwater, decided, what the heck, we're going to get inside our U.S. government-funded helicopters and vehicles, and we're going to drive to Washington, D.C. to kick out Lloyd Austin and General Miley.
We're not going to touch Joe Biden, just Austin and Miley.
Would people call that a coup?
Of course it's a coup.
Because by saying that you want to get rid of Lloyd Austin and General Miley, you're saying that Joe Biden has no authority, that you are a higher authority than the elected president.
Let's just stop the nonsense of pretending this wasn't a coup.
It was a coup.
It was designed to topple the government of Vladimir Putin.
Now, the question is, why?
Well, we have some insight now.
We know that Progozhin, again, he's a businessman.
He's not a military leader.
People need to understand that.
Wagner is a private military company.
It's not an army.
It has no sovereign status.
It exists because the Russian government funded it to the tune of $940 million in an annual contract that was signed on 1 April or 1 May 2022, due to expire 1 May 2023.
And because Progozhin had difficulties with Shoigu and because of the legal aspects of the Donetsk and Lugansk People's Republic becoming Russia, meaning that private military contract can't exist, the contract wasn't going to be extended.
Wagner, if it was going to continue to exist, had to sign a contract with the Ministry of Defense and become a voluntary unit under the auspices of the Ministry of Defense.
This means that Shoigu would lose all that money.
He didn't want to lose that money.
He didn't want that contract.
This was always about money.
This was about greed.
Progozhin's greed put the security of Russia, etc., at risk.
So he was driving on Moscow to get Shoigu and Gerasimov to back down, to say, no, that Wagner could exist under some sort of special extra-legal status.
Wasn't going to happen.
Putin wasn't going to bend.
And had Progozhin kept going, he was going to die.
Putin had put 2,500 special forces in Serpikov.
The lead elements of Wagner had run into them, reported back that these guys are serious.
They're going to kill us all.
Rostov had been surrounded by 10,000 Chechen Ahmad special forces who were under orders to go in and kill Progozhin and kill or capture all of the Wagner people had Progozhin not given up.
So Progozhin gave up because he was going to die, straight up.
In order to prevent bloodshed, Putin and Lukashenko, the president of Belarus, agreed that Progozhin and those who committed treason, and Putin is quite clear about what happened, they get to go to Belarus.
The other people, the 17,000 that stayed in their camps, they get to sign contracts with the Ministry of Defense or go home.
Was there Western intelligence support?
We know that Progozhin was in contact with Ukrainian intelligence, which means that he was indirectly at least in contact with Western intelligence because Ukrainian intelligence doesn't operate without Western intelligence.
Was he operating on behalf of the U.S. intelligence and British intelligence services?
That we don't know yet.
But what we do know is that the U.S. and British intelligence services knew that Progozhin was going to make a move on Moscow, was briefed to the gang of eight, the top eight congressional leaders by the CIA days before Progozhin made a move.
The British prime minister was briefed as well.
And we now know that the U.S. government expected this to be bloody, meaning that they were hoping that this would become a civil war that could topple or at least damage Putin.
Whether they were behind it or just tacitly supporting it, again, we don't know, but they did nothing to stop it, which is problematic because Russia is a nation with tactical nuclear weapons, with strategic nuclear weapons.
And is it really sound policy to have a rogue mercenary element going in to threaten the Russian government when they're at a war for their existential survival?
This was a very dangerous move on the West.
What should have happened is a phone call should have been made to Putin warning him of this so that this could have been nipped in the bud.
But we didn't do that because we wanted this to happen.
We hoped it became violent.
And as we now know, Tony Blinken has admitted it.
We hoped this because we thought it would give opportunities for the Ukrainian forces in the field.
But it's all failed.
It's all collapsed.
This was about greed, nothing more.
And Vladimir Putin has emerged stronger.
I won't say that this is ideal.
You know, it's sort of a banana republic move to have a mercenary force make a move on Moscow.
Just like January 6th was embarrassing for the United States.
This was an embarrassment for Vladimir Putin.
He's not weaker because of it, but this was not a good look for Russia.
It will be months before the tanks get there, in part because many of them have to be built, in part because the ones that are already built have to have certain high-tech equipment removed from them so that they fall into Russian hands.
Russia doesn't have this.
And in part because the repair crews, which are just as large as the crews that operate it, all need to be trained.
Are you hearing something different about when these tanks will arrive?
No, it's going to be months.
Russia is going to make gains.
I have no doubt that this spring is going to be very difficult for Ukraine.
Russia is going to regain territory.
It's going to regain territory.
In Donbas, it's trying to regain all of Donetsk.
Bakhmut is likely to fall.
It's not going to look good for the next few months here.
Do you know Ukraine really needed to push that winter advantage and they didn't?
And they've been on the defensive and it's going to extold price on them.
But, you know, once that equipment arrives, it depends how well the Russians are able to fortify their gains as to how long it takes to then liberate those areas and whether an offensive to go for Crimea is possible this year or not.
It's looking less likely to be possible this year because a lot of the year is going to be spent regaining territory when the tanks arrive that the Russians will take in March, April, and May.
We've talked about military math, so I don't have to go over the burn rate, replenishment rate, et cetera.
The Russians have an extraordinary military advantage, one that they have yet to fully exploit.
They're in the process of developing the battlefield to identify weak links, and then they're going to overwhelm the Ukrainians.
It's not going to be limited advances.
It's going to be an overwhelming advance that will cause the collapse and destruction of the Ukrainian armed forces.
Mr. Van Dyke is somehow of the opinion that Ukraine will be able to compete for this territory effectively and have a controlled withdrawal that will bleed the Russians and eventually cause the Russians to lose momentum, freezing the battlefield until which time the Ukrainians are reinforced.
It's a fantasy world.
This isn't going to be a slow, controlled withdrawal by the Ukrainians.
This is going to be the total collapse of the Ukrainian front line and the annihilation.
And I have one word of advice to Mr. Van Dyke, and I hope you're watching.
Get the hell out of Ukraine because you're dead man walking.
Okay.
You will not survive this offensive if you're anywhere near the front lines.
So leave now.
I say this as somebody who has compassion for you, has respect for what you think you're trying to do there, but it's not worth your life and it's not worth the lives of any Americans who are over there helping you.
Leave now.
Well, I mean, things have changed a little bit too, because now he's stepping into an environment where he actually has far more influence.
Biden has stepped aside.
Now, he will meet with Biden, but Biden isn't in the future of Israel.
The future of Israel is going to be defined by, you know, the Democratic candidate who's no longer named Biden.
We don't know the exact name yet.
And the Republican candidate whose name is Donald Trump, unless he's successfully taken out by people who don't want him to be the candidate, then it'll be JD Vance.
But the point is, the focus is on the Congress of the United States, where, you know, I mean, look, he has bought the Congress.
I mean, he's playing to a paid audience.
He's putting these people to sit in their seats and cheer him.
And he's paid them so well that the head of the U.S. Congress, the Speaker of the House, Mr. Johnson, has threatened to arrest people and charge them should they somehow disrupt the scripted scene that's going to take place where there will be more standing ovations than previously.
The idea is to show not just to Netanyahu, because again, he wrote the script.
This is something he said has to happen.
This has played out for the Israeli people.
This is Netanyahu coming.
He's been beaten in Gaza.
He's being beaten by Hezbollah.
The Houdi have humiliated him.
Now he's coming here to have the American flag wrapped around him to be anointed by the American Congress so he can go back to Israel and say, America is fully behind me.
I have the backing of the United States during these difficult times.
This is an act of political desperation on the part of Benjamin Netanyahu because his military is almost in open rebellion, telling him we are fundamentally broken.
We're running out of tanks because we don't have any spare parts.
We've run out of ammunition.
Our troops are exhausted.
And we can't go to war against Hezbollah because they'll beat us.
That's the reality.
And Ben Yahoo can't take that to the Israeli people.
And so instead, he's going to come here, an act of grand political theater.
And that's what this is all about.
I would like to believe the American people could see through this.
Unfortunately, we keep electing the same bot and paid for members of Congress and Senate, knowing that Israel owns them.
We keep electing them.
So I think the American people are culpable in this as well.
Senator Chuck Schumer, leader of the Democrats in the Senate, has offered a resolution for the sense of the Senate condemning Tucker for having Nick Fuentes on his show and not challenging all of Fuentes' beliefs.
I don't know this fellow Fuentes, but I was very impressed by what he had to say about Trump's truth social post.
So as a bit of a prelude to Tucker coming on tomorrow and to elicit your response, of course, Scott, here's Nick Fuentes yesterday responding to Trump's truth social post on Rob Reiner.
Someone gets murdered by their son.
It's a horrific tragedy.
This is a horrible story.
And nobody deserves that.
I don't care what their politics are, what they said on the internet or on television.
Nobody deserves to be murdered, stabbed to death with their wife by their own son, who they tried to help.
Now, if Trump were actually doing what he promised to do, you could overlook the fact that he's vain, that he's a narcissist, that he's tactical but not strategic.
You could overlook all these things if he was bringing home the goods, that we haven't ended one of the wars.
We haven't remade the federal bureaucracy.
And then he's a d ⁇ on top of it.
Then it's all about his vanity and his own self-aggrandizement on top of it.
What is the redeeming quality now?
It's nothing.
It's hollow.
That's my take on the Rob Reiner stabbing.
No one should be making fun of that.
It's not funny.
Who could, honest to God, look at that and laugh?
This guy had a daughter who now has to live with this.
Her brother is in prison for murdering her parents, who are now dead.
Her life is shattered and destroyed, and so many people's lives are destroyed.
You go on True Social and make a joke about Trump derangement syndrome.
It just goes to show there was never anything there.
There was never a center.
It was always empty.
What do you think?
Look, I only know Nick Fuentes peripherally.
I don't follow.
If I didn't follow Charlie Kirk and I don't follow Nick Fuentes, I try to avoid the domestic political side of social media.
My forte is foreign policy and military affairs and international relations and arms control.
But what he says resonates.
I mean, look, President Trump has many strengths.
He wouldn't be president of the United States if this wasn't manifestly so.
But he has many weaknesses as well.
And these weaknesses are magnified by many of his supporters who refuse to hold him to account.
I mean, one of the things that make people self-regulate is the notion that if you are excessive in your behavior, your social circle will hold you to account and you'll be shamed.
This man knows no shame.
And where he should be shamed, where people should say, no, Mr. President, you shouldn't be doing that.
Nobody says that.
This is a president that has his entire cabinet surround him and lay hands on him as if he is a conduit to the Lord Almighty through prayer session.
This is a man who is the center of a cult of personality of his own manufacture.
And I think at some point in time, I think he's starting to believe that he is that which he seeks to manifest artificially.
So thank you, Nick Fuentes, for saying what you said.
And hopefully it resonates.
And I, look, Tucker Carlson and I have had our differences in the past, but I respect Tucker's integrity.
And I, especially on issues such as this, he's a very moral person.