Jan. 8, 2026 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
22:13
Phil Giraldi: Trump’s Power Grab Is Testing the Constitution
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Undeclared wars are commonplace.
Tragically, our government engages in preemptive war, otherwise known as aggression, with no complaints from the American people.
Sadly, we have become accustomed to living with the illegitimate use of force by government.
To develop a truly free society, the issue of initiating force must be understood and rejected.
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 hi everyone Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
Today is Wednesday, January 7th, 2026.
My dear friend Phil Giraldi joins us now, Phil.
A pleasure, no matter what we're talking about.
Happy New Year to you, no matter how gloomy world events may be.
What is your big picture take on the U.S. invasion in Venezuela on Saturday?
Well, I'm increasingly coming around to the view that it's kind of a provocation that is intended to lead to other developments.
And I basically say that because there are things that have been happening the last couple of days, particularly even today, where the stories are coming out of the British media about the shift of U.S. military personnel and airplanes and ordnance to Britain, apparently to be within striking distance of something.
Now, that kind of makes you think Russia.
It makes you think of the Middle East.
Both are distinct possibilities.
And I have a feeling that this whole business of coming three days after our president was having his intimate talks with Mr. Netanyahu, this came three days later.
I suspect this is something that has to do with something over the horizon that they figured this might have been a distraction from or some kind of other diversion.
So I'm kind of drifting in that direction.
And at this point, I might be the only one, but I think this is more stuff coming over the horizon.
And this is kind of a test run.
Will the Iranians strike before the Israelis do?
I would like to hope the Iranians strike before the Israelis and that they take out their nuclear and other capabilities, but I'm not optimistic about that.
Particularly if the United States is poised to make a real quick entry into the situation that might develop.
And in my head, that's what's kind of looking as a credible next step.
Trump clearly is not interested.
He's not interested in peace, even to take it out and spell the word.
He is ignorant of where this is all going and what will happen if the United States definitely gets the bad reputation of being the world's, maybe even worse than Israel, the world's worst reputation for its foreign policy.
You think Trump is ignorant of the Constitution and of the UN Charter or just doesn't give a damn?
Well, he's certainly ignorant of those two documents, but the fact is that it's not that he doesn't give a damn.
I just think that there's very little going through his head that in any way is tied in closely with U.S. national security or international security or even national interests in a broader sense.
I don't think he thinks that way.
And he's thinking about himself.
I mean, even the Monroe Doctrine, he has to rename it the Donroctine.
His name and his identity has to be embedded in everything he does.
And this is a very, very sick guy.
I would hesitate.
I would not hesitate actually to say he might well be what we consider to be insane.
I wonder if he wants the name Greenland, Trumpland.
That certainly would be on the table.
They're all, of course, talking about it.
We've had more details today from Mr. Stephen Miller and from our Secretary of State and National Security Advisor about the details of just how we're going to, first of all, subjugate Venezuela in terms of what they can and can't do.
They can't even have commercial relations with Russia, China, Cuba, and others.
And of course, we've taken a tanker today which is flagged Russian.
This is all getting deeper and deeper and deeper with no real concern for what the U.S. national interests and the interests of the American people might be.
What do you think the Kremlin's attitude is after seeing the evidence of CIA involvement and the attempted droning of President Putin's house after learning of the U.S. Navy and Coast Guard seizing the Russian tanker or the tanker destined for Russia and after this kidnapping of President Maduro?
I mean, why should Vladimir Putin waste five hours with those two real estate agents that Trump is sending around the world to negotiate for him?
Well, I think the answer to that is that he won't do it again.
Or if he wants to do it again, he will have some motive in mind to kind of confuse the enemy, as it were.
But yeah, the Russians have to look at this and say, look, this guy is either completely nuts or he's got some other agenda, possibly with someone like Netanyahu.
God knows what he is with Zelensky.
He's like a yo-yo, back and forth, up and down in terms of what the U.S. position is.
But this has been the case right from the beginning in some ways.
And of course, with the Russians, there's been the same sort of ambivalence in terms of you and I and many of the contributors you have on your program have cited often how clearly redlined and defined the Russian interests have been right from the beginning.
And they've been just sitting there waiting to be kind of worked on to come up with an acceptable solution, which could have happened six months ago.
It could have happened a year ago.
And yet, because of the inability of the leadership of our foreign policy and of the president in particular, it is very hard to define something that is acceptable to parties when all you're thinking about is how you're going to rename something so that your name is on it.
Here's an interesting statement from a conservative Republican senator who may actually agree with you about the president's mental status, using a phrase unique to him, but you'll fully grasp this, Chris, cut number 17.
You don't have to be Einstein's cousin to figure out that at this juncture, two things are true.
Number one, to invade Greenland would be weapons-grade stupid.
Number two, you know that the future of Venezuela, one way or the other, is going to be determined by the military.
Every time Venezuela has embraced democracy, it has been because the military has gone along.
Every time Venezuela has rejected democracy, it has happened because of the military.
This is not true in all cases, but in this respect, Mao was right.
Power grows from the barrel of a gun.
And the military here is key.
And that's all there is to it.
I got to go.
So he's saying to Stephen Miller and Donald Trump, you keep talking about using the military to take Greenland.
You are weapons-grade stupid.
Yeah.
Will he and the other Republicans in the Senate do anything about it?
Well, I think they're probably, you know, most of the Republicans and even the Democrats, these are not particularly stupid people.
They've gotten to where they are by being both ambitious and being able to sort of come out with a reasonable sentence every once in a while, as we just noted.
And I would bet that most Republicans in Congress are very, very nervous about what is happening in their name.
And they have terrible expectations for what's going to be happening with midterm elections.
And so a lot of this talk is going to be directed towards perhaps changing the narrative away from what Donald Trump is doing and saying and trying to get it back onto some pathway where the American public and voters can actually relate to it.
Trump was successful in doing that when he got elected.
But the fact is that since then he's gone completely off the rails.
And I think that's where he's actually quite happy and comfortable.
And that's the real danger that we're, I mean, he could, you know, he could attack Greenland tomorrow.
How far a Greenland from England?
Is that where these troops and planes and things are being sent?
This is crazy.
And Even talk about using military force to conquer Greenland is incredible.
It's incredible that this is a proposition that would even come up in the United States of America.
Denmark is a NATO ally, and Greenland is basically a part of Denmark, and it's an area and a country that the United States has had good and practical relationships with since forever.
Does the CIA traffic in drugs in Latin America?
I don't know for sure, but of course, there's a lot of evidence suggesting that.
And much of it, of course, goes back a ways.
But I would think, judging from what I think about where the CIA is today as an organization and how it is structured in terms of where it takes direction from,
would mean to me that if drugs were a tool that could be used operationally or could be used just to fund something that they would rather have funded off the books, they would do it.
In my day, I'd never heard of, in fact, the CIA at all back in the 80s and 90s had very strong mandates for collecting intelligence that would expose drug dealership and drug dealers.
But that was a different world at that time.
How about the Drug Enforcement Administration?
Can the same be said of them with respect to a desire to distribute drugs in order to raise cash to fund an off-the-books operation?
Yeah, I would think that the same kind of rule applies.
I mean, the DEA is kind of like the CIA in terms of it, it feels that they have a certain latitude to do things that are, shall we say, unconventional.
So, yeah, I wouldn't be surprised.
But of course, law enforcement is kind of on that borderline very generally in a lot of cases.
FBI corruption.
There's been corruption in government in the United States for a long time, but now the corruption seems to be in charge.
Do CIA officers of which you were once one routinely acquire foreign passports?
Well, the short answer to that is yes.
I had a bunch of them myself.
But see, I was an operations officer, so I had to have the freedom to travel to some countries where perhaps an American popping up would not have been desirable.
And so I had operational reasons to have false passports.
But your average CIA officer was just in Washington doing analysis or anything like that.
No, they wouldn't have any need.
And the issue of the documents, again, back when I was there, was basically very dependent on using them operationally.
If you didn't have a need to use, you wouldn't be issued the documents.
So we just had Sheriff David Hathaway on.
Don't let the word sheriff fool you.
He was a DEA agent for 30 years.
The last 10 or so as a supervisory agent in Bolivia, very familiar with the drug trade in Latin America, who told us that he had a half a dozen foreign passports, and many of the people that worked with him regularly did.
The reason I mentioned that is because one of the allegations in the indictment of Maduro is that he gave Venezuelan passports to foreigners who turned out to be bad people.
Well, how could he possibly be held accountable for that?
Suppose you committed a crime while in possession of one of these foreign passports, would the chief of the government that issued it to you possibly be held liable for that crime?
Of course not.
Sure.
And look at the example of Donald Trump, who's now quite willing to sell American citizenship for people who come up with a certain amount of money, a million dollars, right?
It's going to be the gold passports, and they'll probably be named after Trump.
I mean, this is ridiculous.
So if you hand a passport to somebody without really knowing anything about that person, except that they want a passport and they might be able to come up with money or some other quid pro quo to get a passport.
After that, it's up to the person in terms of how they use it.
Wow.
What can stop Trump?
I'm sorry, what is what?
I'm sorry, Phil.
What can stop Trump from another escapade like this?
As you said, he could bomb Greenland tomorrow.
He could do so from England if that's where the American military assets are.
Yeah, well, what's to stop Trump is, well, I actually thought that the Trump peace plan in the Middle East was something that would stop people like Netanyahu from doing two crazy things and that this would be good for Trump and good for his reputation.
But as it turns out, he doesn't seem to care about that.
He'll do, clearly, he'll do whatever Netanyahu wants him to do.
And at the last meeting they've had together, apart from what they might have discussed about Venezuela, they certainly discussed Iran.
And Trump basically gave him a green light for going after Iran, both Israel and the United States in a supportive but very active role.
So this is just awful.
Iran doesn't threaten the United States any more than Venezuela does, or Cuba, of course, which is being mentioned now.
So what is going on with these people?
What is going to stop Trump is, I think, and I hate this, the bottom blowing out of the U.S. economy.
So he's going to use the military to steal oil.
McGregor says that his sources tell him it'll be three or four years before the theft of that oil can be profitable, A, because of the need for new equipment to extract it from the earth, and B, because of the process of refining it.
Apparently, this is very, very heavy oil that takes a long time and is very costly to refine.
So I don't know if Trump knows or understands that or just feels that oil is oil and he can boast about it.
Well, I think in this case, the agenda is being driven more by our esteemed Secretary of State, who has a passion about Cuba and the Latino countries.
And Trump might just be sort of an ignorant observer who's going along with it.
Although I think there is a Trump has a sort of animosity on issues that comes to the surface all the time, where he feels that people have to obey him and listen to him.
I think they're trotting out today, I'm sure you've seen some of it, new guidelines for what this running of Venezuela is going to be like.
And it's curious, but Venezuela will be any more than it is now, a non-country, not able to trade with these other countries, not able to sell its own oil, and kind of having its foreign policy and domestic policies dictated by people from Washington.
Without any legal authority whatsoever, just might makes right.
Absolutely.
They have no legal authority.
The whole arguments, of course, being made for what interventions have taken place so far with Venezuela are completely bogus.
Hey, Phil, thank you very much, my dear friend.
Much appreciated.
As always, I saw Rupert behind you.
I think I see him asleep over your left shoulder.
That's right.
I hope he's having a fruitful afternoon.
Thank you, my dear friend.
All the best to you.
Okay.
Well, we'll see you next week.
You got it, Phil.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Tomorrow we have two new guests for you.
At 10 in the morning, Colonel Jacques Bow, spelled B-A-U-D, if you've seen the name.
He's the retired Swiss military and intelligence officer who has been sanctioned by the EU for speaking out against the war in Ukraine, actually for predicting that the Ukrainians would lose.
That's at 10 in the morning.
At 11 in the morning, our old buddy Aaron Mate, at 1 in the afternoon, a longtime friend of mine who's never been on the show, one of the great defenders of civil liberties in the world, Glenn Greenwald.
And I'm going to ask him about how he helped get out the truth from Edward Snowden while all the feds in the country were chasing Snowden until he escaped.
At two o'clock, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson.
At four o'clock, Professor John Mearsheimer.
An interesting day towards which I look forward and I hope you'll enjoy it.