Judging Freedom - $858 Billion Defense Bill - What_s in it_

Episode Date: December 17, 2022

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Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Friday, December 16th, 2022. It's about 3.35 in the afternoon here on the east coast of the United States. Two interesting developments yesterday with respect to the Congress of the United States, your and my representatives in the House of Representatives and in the Senate. The Congress passed the NDAA, the National Defense Authorization Act. This bill authorizes the federal government to spend $858 billion, theoretically, for defense purposes, theoretically all for the Pentagon. Not all of it goes there. As you'll hear in a minute, there's a lot of goodies that the Congress tacks on there. The bill itself is 4,400 pages long. You heard me correctly, 4,400 pages long, we can safely conclude that no member of Congress has

read the entire bill. So we have yet again, this happened with Obamacare, it happened with the Patriot Act, it actually happens with this NDAA, National Defense Authorization Act, every year, your members of Congress, whoever represents you in the House of Representatives and whoever represents you in the U.S. Senate, votes for legislation that they haven't read. They have a summary of what's in there, and they believe the crafters of the summary. Every once in a while in January, you'll see, oh, this was in there, that was in there. Members of Congress will say, I didn't know about it, I didn't know about it, but I voted for it anyway. Very few are principled enough to say, if I don't understand it, if I didn't know about it, but I voted for it anyway. Very few are principled enough to say, if I don't understand it, if I don't have the time to read it, I'm going to vote no.

How much is $858 billion? Well, it's almost a trillion. It is more than the defense budgets of the next 12 countries combined, which includes, of course, Russia, Great Britain, Germany, France, Italy, and China. More than all of them combined. Well, we still have 900, no mistake, 900 military bases around the world that we have to pay for. That's outside the United States of America. $160 billion in new military equipment. The rest of the money for support of the military and paying the overhead on 900 military installations around the world. 800 million more for Ukraine. This is on top of the 65 billion that has already been approved. A 1950 Harry Truman era statute prohibited banks from hiring people with criminal records. Well, this gets rid of that prohibition. So banks can now hire crooks.

Banks can hire people, literally, who've been convicted of crimes of deception and dishonesty and theft. Why that's in there? Who knows? To do a favor for the banking lobby or do a favor for some member of Congress, House of Representatives or the Senate, who's close with the president of one of the major banks. A foolhardy, foolish, incredible waste of money that, of course, I would have voted against. While they were voting for and against it, some of them were shaking in their boots over the revelation that Sam

Bankman Freed, you all know who that is, the 30-year-old whiz kid who's now in a filthy, rotten, subterranean jail in the Bahamas awaiting extradition to Manhattan to go to the filthy, rotten, above-the-ground jail where Jeffrey Epstein was when he died. But Sam Bankman Freed is awaiting trial on the indictment, which accuses him of engaging in a swindle whereby he swindled billions from investors. Then he had people like Tom Brady and Shaquille O'Neal and Naomi Osaka and Steph Curry and the former Mrs. Brady, Gisele Bundchen, doing television and social media commercials for Sam Bankman Freed. Okay, you get the picture. But Sam Bankman Freed gave $400 million in political contributions to members of both parties, to Democrats and to Republicans, to 130 members, equally divided amongst both parties, more or less, in the House of Representatives.

His contributions to the Democrats are public and well-known. His contributions to the Republicans were given through intermediaries. That type of a contribution, depending upon how he did it, can be legal or it can be criminal. He said he did it that way because his friends in the press and his buddies and his girlfriend are all Democrats. He didn't want anybody to know that he's giving money to Republicans. Do they have to return that money? They don't have to return it if they didn't know that it was stolen at the time it was given to them, but they will suffer politically terribly if they don't return it. That's the week in Congress this week. I think they're still going

to be around next week because they voted to raise the debt ceiling to allow the government to borrow more money because the government is supposed to go out of business this Saturday evening. How much more are they going to let the government borrow? Well, they didn't say, but they're going to let the government stay in business for another week. So on December 23rd, which is next Friday, Congress will be going through this all over again. More as we get it. Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom.