Jan. 3, 2026 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
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Scott Ritter : U.S. Attacks Venezuela
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Freedom is a fragile thing, and it's never more than one generation away from extinction.
It is not ours by way of inheritance.
It must be fought for and defended constantly by each generation, for it comes only once to a people.
And those in world history who have known freedom and then lost it have never known it again.
What if sometimes to love your country, you had to alter or abolish the government?
What if Jefferson was right?
What if that government is best which governs least?
What if it is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong?
What if it is better to perish fighting for freedom than to live as a slave?
What if freedom's greatest hour of danger is now?
Welcome to this special edition of Judging Freedom.
Judge Andrew Napolitano here with Scott Ritter.
Today is Saturday, January 3rd, 2025.
Scott, thank you very much.
2026.
Scott, thank you very much for your time on a Saturday afternoon.
We are here, of course, to talk about the events in Venezuela in the past 24 hours.
How can the president possibly explain or justify this invasion and takeover of the government of another country in terms of America's national security needs?
Well, I think that, first of all, you have to understand that the president isn't going to have a fact-based discussion with the American people.
The president's in the business of shaping perceptions.
And that's exactly what he's going to do.
He's going to spend this as a great win for American national security because we have eliminated one of the main sources of the illegal flow of narcotics to the United States.
Now, this is, of course, a lie.
Venezuela is not the main source, Colombia, Mexico.
They come from a lot of places.
Fentanyl, no fentanyl comes from Venezuela.
It all comes across the Mexican border, or at least the majority of it.
So if we had a fact-based conversation, the president would be shown to be a liar.
But that's not, again, I don't mean to be insulting too many people, but I'm going to insult a lot of people right now.
MAGA, the MAGA movement, is comprised of some of the most ignorant people in the world about the world we live in.
They know nothing about the world and they don't care about the world.
This America First, a mantra that's out there, disguises a whole host of sins.
And one of the greatest sins is disguised as sin of ignorance.
The American people are largely ignorant of the world we live in.
We are extraordinarily ignorant about Venezuela, and therefore we are susceptible to be told things and believe things as long as we're not prompted to dig too deeply into the issues like drugs.
We're told we have a drug problem.
We do have a drug problem.
We're told that we have a fentanyl problem.
I think the statistics prove that.
But then they say that Venezuela is the source of this and getting rid of Maduro will go a long way to resolving this.
That's a lie.
It's not going to resolve anything.
But what the president did here is he created a made-for-TV narrative.
We went in and we got the bad guy.
And it looked very easy because, of course, we're the strongest nation in the world under Donald Trump.
And we don't want to dig into how this was so easy, how the CIA probably paid hundreds of millions of dollars directly or indirectly to the political elite, including the military and security forces of Venezuela, to step aside and let us do this staged event, because this was a staged event.
You don't go in with two troops of Delta Force into a hostile capital city and launch an assault of this nature unless everything was cleared in advance.
That's the quickest way to lose 35 Delta troops.
No, they went in.
It was cleared hot to go in.
It was a permissive environment.
They got their made-for-TV moment, and then they left.
And Donald Trump's going to build on that.
But I think what you're going to see is that we have, over the course of the past several months, exploited both the sanctions and the possibility of lifting sanctions and the reality of the oil, of the money that's attached to the flow of oil.
And we bought out the political and economic elite of Venezuela, including those who just a week ago were saying that they're standing with Maduro for life.
Well, apparently they have a price and that price was paid and we own them and we own Venezuela now.
I think for the president, this is about perception.
And right now, for the MAGA audience who doesn't ask a lot of discerning questions, this is a great victory.
This is exactly what the president wanted.
The president claims that this was the arrest of a fugitive from justice.
The charges against him are grossly exaggerated.
There's no mention of fentanyl whatsoever in the indictment against them.
One of the charges against him is possession of a weapon in violation of the United States Firearms Act of 1934, which has since been found unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.
You can't say this with a straight face.
How can somebody in Caracas, Venezuela possessing a weapon that is lawful in Caracas, Venezuela, be indicted for violating American federal law?
This is the nonsense that you are right.
Donald Trump will try to sell to the American people.
This is not a law enforcement event.
This is an attack and takeover of the government of a foreign country, which what?
Pete Hegseth and Marco Rubio are now going to rise?
Yeah, like Douglas MacArthur running Japan, apparently, after the end of World War II.
Judge, it gets even better than this because this whole indictment, there's reference to the, and I don't know, I can't remember the Spanish name, the Sun's drug cartel, the something, something of the Sun.
That was a CIA front, and we know it.
So the interesting part is during this trial, when Maduro starts demanding access to the CIA records, how that's going to play out, because this isn't something that the Venezuelan government did.
This is a CIA narco-front that was created by the CIA, I think, in 1989, sometime around that timeframe.
So this case should be dismissed outright, but maybe that's what will happen.
And then they allow Maduro to go because there's an element of collaboration here with Maduro.
This went down too easily.
He went too willingly.
And so maybe there's something here where they'll throw this case out, then he'll go into exile in China or Russia or someplace.
Who knows?
Who knows what's going to happen?
But the bottom line is this is not about the rule of law.
This is the antithesis of the rule of law.
This is an, you know, you can indict a ham sandwich.
And so, this just the fact that Maduro was indicted by the Southern District of New York means nothing.
An indictment is not a finding of guilt.
And so, you know, we have an innocent man.
Again, Americans need to understand that.
He is cloaked with the presumption of innocence.
We've already found him guilty.
We've already declared him to be a drug trafficker.
We're already moving on.
You know, we use this as a regime change excuse.
We aren't a nation of the rule of law anymore.
And I think that this week, this has not been a good week for America.
It might be a good week for Donald Trump politically, but for America, this week showed that we were willing to risk global thermonuclear war to send a message to Vladimir Putin that we could target him when we wanted to target him.
Because that's what happened with this drone attack.
It was a CIA target, a CIA-run operation directed by the president of the United States to send a signal.
And the thing is, the Russians know it.
They turned over one of the recovered chips that have all the data on it.
And if you know anything about targeting and intelligence and all this, the data proves that the CIA, that the United States was intimately involved, proves it.
And the Russians handed it to the Americans.
And they don't need to say it out loud.
They just need to say, here, we know everything.
And when you look at that chip, you'll know exactly what we know.
Don't try to lie to us again.
We know what you did.
And this changes Russia's approach to the United States.
It'll change their approach towards negotiations, I believe.
And then what we did in Venezuela, again, is just a signal that the United States is a rogue nation.
We operate void of any notion of international law.
And it's not even open for speculation anymore.
Will Vladimir Putin trust Donald Trump again?
No.
I mean, again, I can't speak for Vladimir Putin, and I can't speak for anybody in the Russian government.
But first of all, we have to understand there Vladimir Putin always said that he doesn't trust anybody.
He's the president of Russia.
His job isn't to trust anybody.
His job is to look out for the best interests of Russia.
Having said that, there are people that you can work with.
You can work with on a collegial basis.
You know, trust but verify, perhaps.
The Russians, of course, aren't going to stop having diplomatic relations with the United States.
But I think this was a cold shower for the Russians, the reality that the United States government, especially led by Donald Trump, is incapable of negotiating in good faith.
That we are duplicitous.
We lie.
We can't be trusted on anything.
And I do think that this is probably the end of Kirill Dmitriev's economic-based diplomacy.
I think, you know, going forward, just the stupidity, sorry, I don't like to use that word, but the stupidity of believing that Steve Witcoff and Jerry Kushner were capable of negotiating good faith on behalf of the United States of America.
These are people who live for a profit, and the profit is usually attached to actions that are to the sole benefit of the United States.
Look at Gaza, for instance, and the development taking place as genocide unfolds.
And here we have them talking about great Arctic exploitation things.
At the same time, they tried to target a presidential facility.
I just don't think the Russians will ever trust the United States to or believe that the United States is acting in good faith.
How do you think this invasion and takeover of the government of Venezuela is viewed in Beijing?
I mean, First of all, I don't know to what extent the Chinese government believed that the Venezuelan government had resilience.
They sent a negotiating team, I think, 10 hours before Maduro was taken into custody by the United States, a high-level Chinese negotiating team was there talking with him.
That leads me to believe the Chinese believe that Maduro was a serious leader.
and that the Venezuelan government was a serious government.
I think what we've seen now is that Maduro wasn't a serious leader.
He was surrounded by a sea of corruption that was exploited by the CIA to the benefit of the United States, and it left China, Russia, and everybody else hanging dry.
So from the Chinese perspective, I think you have to take a step back and reverse engineer everything that you were doing with Maduro and understand that you were betrayed.
And then the question is, at what point did the Venezuelan elites sell their soul to the United States?
And what did China commit to after that point?
I think the Chinese have some mud on their face because you are responsible for doing your due diligence on the people you negotiate with.
And I think that if they believe that the Venezuelans were negotiating good faith with China, it's now been proven that that's not the case.
Is Trump buying himself another Vietnam?
And before you answer that, here's his comments about boots on the ground.
Chris, number seven.
Does the U.S. running the country mean that U.S. troops will be on the ground?
How will that work?
Well, you know, they always say boots on the ground.
Oh, so we're not afraid of boots on the ground if we have to have.
We had boots on the ground last night at a very high level, actually.
We're not afraid of it.
We don't mind saying it.
But we're going to make sure that that country is run properly.
We're not doing this in vain.
This is a very dangerous attack.
This is an attack that could have gone very, very badly.
Could have gone very badly.
We could have lost a lot of people last night.
We could have lost a lot of dignity.
We could have lost a lot of equipment.
The equipment is less important, but we could have lost a lot.
And we're going to make sure that this is proper.
We're there now.
We're ready to go again if we have to.
We're going to run the country right.
It's going to be run very judiciously, very fairly.
You know, they stole our oil.
We built that whole industry there.
And they just took it over like we were nothing.
And we had a president that decided not to do anything about it.
So we did something about it.
We're late, but we did something about it.
Yeah, please.
Nothing about oil in the indictment.
The references to him in the indictment are as the president of Venezuela, notwithstanding what Marco Rubio wants to say.
But is, let me ask you what I mentioned before we watched that clip.
Is Trump buying himself another Vietnam?
I don't believe so.
I think that this operation appears to have been crafted to avoid that situation.
Why do I say that?
This isn't your classic regime change operation where, for instance, when we got rid of Saddam Hussein, one of the first things that Paul Brimer did is disband the Iraqi military, thereby creating a vacuum of authority and legitimacy.
The Venezuelan Ministry of Defense is intact, led by the Minister of Defense.
The Ministry of Interior is intact, led by the Minister of Interior.
And we're not making any moves to remove them from power at this juncture.
So the structures of security that existed under Maduro exist to this day.
Same people, same soldiers, same barracks.
The only difference is that the Minister of Interior and the Minister of Defense appear to be taking orders from the United States, from the CIA, from the State Department, from the people who paid them off.
And if that's the case and these people can maintain security, and they toe the line, there's no need for the United States to put boots on the ground.
Donald Trump knows for a fact that he doesn't have 100,000, 200,000, 300,000 excess troops to go into Venezuela, and he knows what would happen if he did do that.
When he says boots on the ground, he's basically talking about a repeat of the Delta Force raid last night, that we could go in and take out the Minister of Defense if we wanted to.
We could take out the Minister of Interior, that any one of these elites that have signed up to this and said we're here to support this post-Maduro exercise, if they forget what they promised, we can go in and take them out with boots on the ground.
But I don't think Donald Trump is talking about large-scale military deployments into Venezuela.
It's not needed because basically we own the Venezuelan military and we own the Venezuelan security forces.
Not to raise your blood pressure, but here's the Secretary of Defense who calls himself the Secretary of War crowing about what happened.
Chris number five.
Nicholas Maduro had his chance, just like Iran had their chance, until they didn't and until he didn't.
He effed around and he found out.
President Trump is deadly serious about stopping the flow of gangs and violence to our country.
Deadly serious about stopping the flow of drugs and poison to our people.
Deadly serious about getting back the oil that was stolen from us and deadly serious about reestablishing American deterrence and dominance in the Western hemisphere.
This is about the safety, security, freedom, and prosperity of the American people.
This is America first.
This is peace through strength.
And the United States War Department is proud to help deliver it.
Welcome to 2026.
And under President Trump, America is back.
How does doubted veteran, how do senior military feel when they hear this kind of Hollywood-like nonsense?
It's stupidity in the extreme.
I mean, everything he said in there was legally challengeable, meaning that the legal basis, the found de facto basis for the things he was asserting aren't there.
There's a reason why other presidencies didn't do things like this because it was blatantly illegal.
But, you know, basically, as I said earlier, Donald Trump only needs, he's not, Donald Trump's not here to win over the Democrats.
He's not here to win over the Kamala Harris crowd or the former Joe Biden supporters.
He's not here to win over, you know, anybody but his base.
He needs his base to come out in November and allow him to finish his term as the uncontested dictator of the United States because that's what he is right now.
He's functioning as a dictator.
He's not asking correct congressional permission.
He's basically allowing the CIA to do whatever it wants to do in Russia and Venezuela, anywhere without congressional oversight.
We have a Secretary of State who's dual-hatted as the national security advisory, which creates a whole host of constitutional issues.
And then we have a Secretary of War who doesn't exist.
There is no Secretary of War.
Congress has to change that designation.
He doesn't get to do it unilaterally, but the president doesn't care.
This is a president who has assumed unilateral dictatorial powers in the realm of national security, and he's applying them very aggressively in accordance with the Trump corollary to the Monroe 2.0 doctrine that he spoke about as national security strategy document.
This plays well.
If this doesn't go south, if we don't have body bags coming home, if oil prices don't spike, this plays well to the political base of Donald Trump, the MAGA base, because people say, well, it's a war, but it's the kind of war that Donald Trump said that he could do.
He's not going to get us embroiled in these forever wars where we go in there and we get bogged down and we drain our resources.
He went in there and we took out the leader.
We now have the largest oil reserves in the world and everything's great.
And the MA people are going, yeah, baby, that's good for America.
America first.
America first is just a mantra that disguises a whole host of sins, number one of which is that we are no longer a nation of laws.
And as somebody who took an oath to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, because the Constitution defines us as a nation of law, this is very disturbing.
And I would imagine that this is disturbing to anybody who has a brain who wore the uniform of the United States military.
Here is the president crowing about America first, Scott.
Chris, number six.
Mr. President, why is running a country in South America America first?
Well, I think it is because we want to surround ourselves with good neighbors.
We want to surround ourselves with stability.
We want to surround ourselves with energy.
We have tremendous energy in that country.
It's very important that we protect it.
We need that for ourselves.
We need that for the world.
And we want to make sure we can protect it.
In other words, we'll steal whatever we can.
Yeah, look, this Venezuela exercise, if it goes off the way Trump wants it to go off, I hate to say well because well implies that somehow that justifies what he did.
The ends do not justify the means.
Trump has said things.
For instance, the reality of fentanyl.
This isn't resolving that problem.
The Americans will continue to die in large numbers because of fentanyl.
That fentanyl is coming over the border from Mexico.
So what?
Are we going to go in and take out the Mexican president next?
Because the president has said that the drug cartels in Mexico are a big problem.
He's creating a parallel argument for Mexico to apply the Venezuelan solution.
What about Colombia?
One of the biggest sources of narcotics.
All the things that we've accused Venezuela of doing is actually coming out of Colombia.
Are we going to remove the Colombian leadership?
You know, this is the path that we're headed on right now.
This is America first.
This is make America great again.
It's about, and again, I called this back in April.
I said that this president is moving towards a Fortress America mindset, that we are going to decouple ourselves to the extent possible from Europe, from the Middle East, to concentrate our forces here in our own hemisphere where we will be extraordinarily aggressive.
Wait for Panama.
That ain't done yet.
Wait for Peru.
You know, there's a big port facility in Peru where China is shipping in containers that then go on a railroad to go to Brazil, bypassing the Panama Canal.
How long do you think Trump's going to let that port facility function the way it is?
If the Peruvian government won't shut it down, there won't be a Peruvian government in place that does.
This is the standard that Donald Trump has set.
When we decide that a Western hemisphere nation possesses resources that are to the benefit of the United States, we apparently have the right to do anything we want to gain control of those resources.
Let this be a lesson learned to the Danish.
You no longer own Greenland.
You might think you do.
There might be a Danish flag up there now.
You just lost Greenland because the president just got away with violating international law on a massive scale.
And if you think for a second that we didn't handpick the next special envoy to Greenland for the purpose of taking over Greenland and make it part of America, you don't know how this president works.
We live in a new day and age where the United States has become an imperial power ruled by a dictator because Congress refuses to do its job and the American people are asleep at the wheel.
Do you see a nexus between what happened in Venezuela and the coming Israeli-American attack on Iran?
Yeah, I mean, yes, we do.
Look, Venezuela, let me put it this way.
The thing that Iran, Venezuela, and Russia all have in common is that American sanctions policies have been applied aggressively to all three of these.
Now, the purpose of the sanctions policy is to bring about economic despair, economic harm.
And then what happens is when the people are impacted in a negative fashion economically, then you create the false illusion of a gateway to salvation.
If you just do what we tell you to do, we can lift the sanctions and you can be, everything's going to be good.
And if you buy into that lie, you've created leverage now because what you've done is create hope that will not manifest itself.
And that could be turned into fuel for opposition against the government in place.
This is what happened in Venezuela.
We basically ask yourself this.
While Venezuela was under a naval blockade, remember we're boarding ships and doing all this stuff.
Why did I think it was between four and eight tankers, oil tankers, leave Venezuelan ports bound for the United States?
Because those tankers carried oil for Chevron.
And what we did there is show the Venezuelans that we can shut down your oil, but we can also let your oil flow.
And when that oil flows, money accrues to people.
And all you people that wanted a better life with the lifting of sanctions now see the light.
All you have to do now is play our game.
And our game is Maduro's got to go.
And they fell for it.
That's what's happening in Iran today.
The Iranians have allowed themselves to buy into the notion that sanctions could be lifted.
And that creates economic hope that isn't realized.
It creates despair.
That creates the opportunity for an opposition to arise.
And that's what we see.
And this is what could happen in Russia.
We have the sanctions in place.
Now you have Kirill Dmitriev meeting with Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner.
I mean, the most unconventional diplomatic interface the world's ever seen.
And all they're talking about is economic potential, economic potential, economic potential.
At the same time they're doing this, the CIA launches attack against the Russian president's residents.
Now, they weren't going to kill Putin, but it sent a signal.
We can get you, and we're getting you.
We're trying to get you at a time when we're pretending to have diplomacy.
We embarrassed you.
This attack was designed to show President Putin as weak, weak at the same time that we were telling the Russian people who are suffering from sanctions that your life could be better if you just better relations with us.
But now, Putin, because Trump, I'm very upset with Putin about Ukraine.
This is the game that's being played right now to bring down the Russian government.
It's the same thing we did it successfully did in Venezuela.
Now, I'm not saying Delta Force is going to go into the Kremlin and pull out Putin.
It's not.
But what they're trying to do is create domestic unrest.
This is the same old policy we had before.
The Russians have to wake up.
They have to wake up to realize that the United States can't be trusted, that there is no negotiating good faith on the part of the United States.
And sadly, the Kirill Dmitriev initiative, I think, is dead in the water.
It has to be shut down.
Scott Ritter, thank you very much, my dear friend.
You came to us in the middle of a Saturday afternoon after much traveling, and I can't thank you enough for your time.
We'll talk to you again next week.
All the best.
Okay, thanks.
Thank you.
And we'll be back with our usual schedule next week starting Monday.
Aleister Crook at 8 in the morning, Ray McGovern at 10 in the morning, Larry Johnson at 11:30 in the morning, and other guests in the afternoon and your favorites throughout the week.