April 12, 2026 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
23:12
Ray McGovern : Israel Lost the War and Netanyahu Back on Trial
Ray McGovern and Judge Andrew Napolitano analyze President Trump's alleged insult to the Pope as a sign of instability ahead of midterms, while dissecting how Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Mossad chief David Barnea allegedly lobbied for war with Iran. Despite 60% American disapproval of Israel, McGovern highlights the dichotomy where 96% of Israelis support Netanyahu's aggression, noting failed negotiations mediated by Jared Kushner and David Wittkof that collapsed over nuclear enrichment terms. With Vice President JD Vance unable to secure a deal and Russia offering uranium acceptance to de-escalate, the hosts warn Trump may consider a "Samson option," predicting rising gasoline prices from a Strait of Hormuz blockade will eventually force a resolution. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Gold Silver And Global Uncertainty00:02:36
Undeclared wars are commonplace.
Tragically, our government engages in preemptive war, otherwise known as aggression, with no complaints from the American people.
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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 Monday, April 13th, 2026.
Ray McGovern will be here with us in just a moment on Trump insults the Pope and Israel losing a war.
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Ray McGovern, welcome here, my dear friend, and thank you very much, as always, for accommodating.
My schedule.
Trump Vance And Nuclear Fears00:15:44
Before we get to the destruction of Israel, the bitterness in the Netanyahu camp, the absence of popularity for his government in the U.S., what does President Trump gain by insulting the Pope?
Judge, I've been saying for a long time that he's not well.
Now I think he's lost it.
I mean, it really begs the question there were 55%.
Of the Catholics that voted for him last time around, is he willing to fritter that away by insulting the Pope gratuitously?
And why might he be thinking of doing that?
Does he not care about the midterm elections?
Does he have other plans?
When I see mammoth warehouses being picked up in rural areas by ICE, I'm wondering what they have in mind for the rest of us.
So it may be.
That this is a dangerous signal, that he doesn't really worry too much about the midterms.
Casting aside the Catholic vote and provoking all these other kinds of folks makes no sense unless he doesn't care.
If he doesn't care, well, what does he have in mind and what do the people advising him have in mind with respect to the elections coming just months from now and the price of gasoline going sky high?
Right, right.
Before we play the Pope's comment, Chris, can you post this repellent piece that Trump posted on his so called Truth Social this morning?
If you can blow that up a little bit, Chris.
That is either Trump as God the Father ministering to Jesus or Trump as a Jesus like figure ministering to someone who looks like Jesus.
In either case, it portrays Trump.
As a deity insulting Catholicism and all of Christianity at its core.
When you asked Chris to blow that up, I was hoping I would actually blow it up.
It's kind of like we used to call a holy card, right?
You put it on the little stanchion at funerals, and on the back would say, Don't worry, Donald Trump is going to make sure you get right to heaven.
I mean, hello, he has lost it.
Now, the lighter side of this is that he's up against an American Pope.
And this American Pope, Is not above pantomiming him, aping him, kind of making sure that people really get his message by what?
I haven't kept conducting an interview on a plane, on board.
Here is the Pope on board.
He's talking very succinctly and very directly about, you know, this is not Christianity is all about.
I mean, you can buy the holy cart if you like, but it's not going to get you to heaven.
It's going to lead you in the other direction if there is one.
So, you know, The fact that Pope Leo feels confident to do this is a first, okay?
That's a first.
And if you combined it with what the New York Times did on the 8th of April, when it ran an article that was pretty much in the can, right?
It was Maggie Haberman and somebody else who had written a book about this.
And the New York Times editor said, okay, now it's time to release that book.
This is the one that the headline was How Trump.
Led the US into war with Iran, but it wasn't Trump.
It was Netanyahu.
Somebody replaced Netanyahu.
In other words, it read probably how Netanyahu took us to war in Iran because the whole gist of the thing the briefing in the White House Situation Room by the Mossad chief, and then the disclaimers or the regrets or the hesitation that these stalwarts had, like Vice President. JD Vance or everybody but Hankseth.
Well, when did they voice those doubts?
Oh, it was the next day.
And to whom did they voice those doubts?
To Maggie Haberman.
Oh, my God.
This is hard for me.
The piece was a terrific piece.
We know that Netanyahu can twist Trump's arm.
We know that David Barnea, the head of Mossad, spent three days staying at the Blair House across the street from the White House and lobbying the president and his people.
During the day, I don't get some of the stuff in there, particularly Radcliffe and Rubio, who are Zionists claiming that Barnais' proposal was farcical and was BS.
Yeah, maybe you're going to make that claim after it fails, but that they say that to President Trump before he made the decision to go forward.
Now, that's really a photo that speaks a thousand words here.
Look at that photo, which dominates the Top of the fold on April 8th.
How Trump took the U.S.
Oh, wait a second.
Was it Trump?
Oh, no.
Who's that with him?
Well, you and I know, Chris knows, and everybody who's watching this probably knows the other guy is Netanyahu.
But I asked my middle aged daughter, I said, Look at that.
And she said, Oh, wow.
She's extremely well educated.
I said, What do you think?
She said, Well, who's that next to Trump?
So the lesson here, the teaching point is that.
Even though the New York Times can put that thing out, unless they put under the thing right here, that's Netanyahu right here, most people will miss it.
The turning point, however, has been made.
The New York Times is no longer a blessing, Netanyahu on the list.
And besides that, we have Pew poll data, which show that Israel is 60% in disfavor among the American people, and Netanyahu himself 59%.
And what really scares me is.
We have equivalent polls in Israel, as Alistair mentioned this morning, where 96% of the Israeli people support Netanyahu and want him to do more and more ferociously.
So there's a dichotomy here.
And how Trump expects to deal with this, well, he doesn't know what he's doing.
The blockade against the blockade is not going to work.
And so I think that the economics of this thing over the next week or two.
We'll have Trump do another little flip flop.
I think the Chinese and the Russians will be perspicacious enough not to taunt him or not to lead him to do something really crazy.
They'll just wait and see what happens.
And what happens will be the blockade has no way of working without incurring the kinds of casualties and deaths that Trump can't look forward to in any case, whether he's looking toward the midterm elections or not.
He must be bitterly.
angry at himself and the failure of this scheme that Barnea and Netanyahu sold to him.
This will be over in 96 hours.
The regime change will kill the Ayatollah, will destroy the Revolutionary Guard.
There'll be a revolution in the streets.
The Democrats, lowercase d, will take over the government.
Obviously, none of that happened.
And he bought it.
We don't know who in his inner circle argued against it.
I believe the Times piece about the vice president Who would quote us saying at the bitter end, Look, I'm your vice president.
I don't want you to go to war, but if you do, obviously I'll support you.
Well, that was a good thing.
That vice president continues to be humiliated.
11 phone calls to Donald Trump during 21 hours of negotiating.
At least one phone call to Tel Aviv.
You can guess to whom he spoke.
We'll play a clip to the person he spoke with in just a minute.
Monitored by the two Zionist overlords that Trump sent there, who are basically Israeli agents, Witkoff and Kushner.
Take it from there, Ray.
Well, Witkoff and Kushner, there you have the agents provocateurs.
Those are the guys that are.
That have Trump's ear.
And of course, they're mimicking what the head of Mossad has said.
So I was about to say that Vice President Vance had a really key decision to make, especially after Trump decided to eliminate a whole civilization.
Do I quit now?
I mean, vice presidents can quit, okay?
Do I quit now?
Do I find some way to dissociate myself with this?
Or do I go off to negotiate with the Iranians and have to listen to 11 people?
Telephone calls, uh, intermediated by Kushner and Witkoff from the president of the United States telling me what to do, and one call from Netanyahu 11 to 1.
The one call is what the really important one because it gave him instructions look, don't agree to anything, and now Vance has got to live with that.
And yeah, we know that he's been humiliated, but he chose this path, and we'll see how if it redounds to his political benefit.
I suggest over the medium term, it will not.
Agreed with everything you just said.
Here is Netanyahu's version of the phone call.
I don't know who called whom, but of the conversation he had with the vice president.
I spoke yesterday with Vice President JD Vance.
He called me from his plane on the way back from Washington.
He reported to me in detail, as the people of this administration do every day. on the development of the negotiations.
In this case, the explosion in the negotiations.
The explosion came from the American side, which was not willing to tolerate the blatant violation of the agreement to enter negotiations by Iran.
Essentially, the agreement was that there would be a ceasefire and Iran would immediately open the crossings.
They didn't do that.
The Americans were not willing to accept it.
He also conveyed to me that the central issue on the table from the perspective of President Trump and the United States is the removal of all enriched material.
And ensuring that there is no more enrichment in the coming years, and this could be for decades.
Well, then I guess there were two phone calls because we know of one that was made during the negotiation, probably by Kushner, who wound up Netanyahu and said to the vice president, Here, Bibi wants to talk to you.
And then there's this other one from the plane, the one to which Netanyahu just referred.
Yeah.
When I looked at what Netanyahu said to high ranking people in Hebrew, now I don't have Hebrew, but I didn't need to understand Hebrew.
He had lost it as well.
It was very atypical.
I believe it was just yesterday.
So he's out of control as well.
That's why people like the Chinese and others have to be very worried that he will, in effect, implement the Samson option using nuclear weapons.
That's why everybody is being very, very careful.
It's going to play out, hopefully, over the next couple of weeks.
The economics will control everything.
Trump can't possibly.
Tolerate the whole world saying, Look, you did this for God's sake, stop it.
He'll have to stop it somehow himself.
Iranians would always say, Oh, yeah, we're willing to negotiate, but we're not going to negotiate on Israeli terms.
Those were Israeli terms.
Forget about it.
You want to come to talk with our terms?
We'll talk with our terms, but not until then will you have any relief.
Good news, of course, is that at last report, the ceasefire that Iran and the U.S. have been maintaining.
Not so much Israel has stayed in place.
So we still have a few more days to figure out what's going on.
Hopefully, this will end better than most of us feel.
Well, I mean, what kind of a negotiation could this have been for 21 hours straight by a person, admittedly the vice president of the United States, but totally inexperienced in negotiating with Trump's two monitors over his shoulder?
Where could anyone have expected this to go?
Well, inexperienced Vance is, but he's bright as hell, okay?
Now we have from the Iranians, from Arachi, the foreign minister, that we were very close.
We had pretty much business like conversations and we were very close until the very end.
That must have been the 10th or the 11th telephone call and the last one from Netanyahu, the one.
At the end, they just wouldn't deal with us.
They went back to their demands, Israeli demands.
They wouldn't talk to us.
So it all fell apart.
They walked away.
I believe that's probably what happened.
What happened with these last conversations?
Well, the first nine or ten said, Can we give in on this one?
Zero enrichment?
Well, you know, we don't need that.
We can blah, blah, blah, blah.
But when it came down, push came to shove, and they said, Okay, this is what we worked out.
The answer came back from the White House and from Netanyahu.
Niet.
Nine.
Nothing.
Don't do it.
Zero.
How do you think this plays in the Kremlin?
The silliness over the weekend, this non negotiating.
How do they look at this?
They already have a lot of experience with Kushner and Witkoff.
It increases their distrust.
Let's face it, Judge, trust is the coin of the realm.
If you're going to deal with a major power, you have to have a modicum of trust.
George Shultz, at 100 years old, wrote his last.
His last op ed on the necessity to have trust if you're going to deal, okay?
He was 100.
It appeared in the Foreign Services Journal.
It was all about trust.
So the trust is gone, and now it's going to be just, you know, the Russians will continue to attrition the rest of the Ukrainian army.
And yeah, they'll be willing to talk again, but they'll have even less trust than they had before because Witkov and Kushner have shown themselves to be shysters.
Let's face it.
I mean, for God's sake.
Trusting Major Powers Like Russia00:04:07
The Iranians are not going to be folded.
Fold me once, fold me.
The Iranians are going to be folded again.
Neither are the Russians.
Here's Dmitry Peskov.
I'm not sure if this is yesterday or this morning, but it's very, very recent.
Chris?
To accept Iranian enriched uranium.
Is it still valid?
This specific proposal was formally presented by President Putin during his various diplomatic contacts with both the United States and multiple key regional states.
The proposal is still valid today, but it has not yet been officially taken up or implemented by the parties involved.
Anything else, please?
It's valid, it's valid.
Can we say that it is valid?
I said it has not been taken up.
Well, in fact, Russia is open.
Russia continues to maintain a position of being fully open to providing any necessary good offices that would contribute to the meaningful de-escalation of the growing geopolitical tensions surrounding the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Again, this is a decision that will be made in Brussels.
We believe that any actions aimed at further fueling the militaristic and pro war ambitions of the Kyiv regime are steps that do not contribute to the search for a peaceful settlement.
However, the Europeans do not hide their general policy of continuing this war, of doing everything possible to promote the continuation of the war.
About both wars, there.
Will the Russians allow Iran to collapse?
Will the Chinese allow Iran to collapse?
No, they won't.
And there's slim danger of that happening unless Netanyahu decides he's in such dire straits, in extremis, if you will, that he'll use nuclear weapons.
And the Russians and Chinese are going to bend over backwards, not to alienate Trump to the degree that he might bless that kind of thing.
I mean, he's going to not have a holy card if he destroys the rest of the world.
Now, the first part of that thing, Peskov, I believe, is talking about.
Russian good officers to take some of that uranium, including the highly enriched uranium, 60%, to take it to Russia.
Those kinds of deals have been in the offing for years and years.
And what is he saying?
Look, you know, our offer is on the table.
If the Americans and the Iranians want to buy into this, that's one way that we can really help.
And we're always willing to give our good officers to this purpose.
Now, that is very current.
The Iranians have said, yeah, we could do that.
They told They told Witkoff and Kushner that when the foreign minister of Oman mediated their talks in Geneva.
That's just out 10 days ago, my God.
So there are solutions here, whether Trump can be persuaded by, you know, if he believes that the Iranians have no cards, he's got it upside down.
The Americans have no cards.
Is keep the strait pretty much closed and they've got the magic card, okay?
That's the ace in the hole, so to speak.
And they're going to do that.
And there's nothing that the Americans could do.
Even if they blockaded people, ships coming out of the strait, they're not going to be able to open up the strait.
That's going to have to be done by and by and not too long from now if gasoline is not going to go over $10 a gallon.
And that's what will force a resolution.
That's why I think the Russians.
And the Chinese are proceeding very gingerly.
If some U.S. helicopter lands on a Chinese owned oil tanker, that's going to change things, okay?
The Strait As An Ace00:00:40
I just hope and pray.
I can use one of those holy cards there of Trump.
I hope and pray that nobody is stupid enough to do that.
Ray McGovern, thank you very much.
You're a character, Ray.
God love you.
We look forward to seeing you at the end of the week with Larry.
Thank you, Ray.
Have a great week.
All the best to you.
Coming up later today, in 35 minutes, if you're watching us live, at 11 o'clock this morning on All of This, Scott Ritter at 1 this afternoon, Jim Webb at 3 30 this afternoon, Professor Jeffrey Sachs.