Judging Freedom - Aaron Maté : UK’s Overseas Info War.

Episode Date: September 3, 2025

Aaron Maté : UK’s Overseas Info War.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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That's an equivalent to $15 a month. Limited time new customer offer for first three months only. Speeds may slow above 35 gigabytes on unlimited. plan. Taxes and fees extra. See Mint Mobile for details. Hi, everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Wednesday, September 3rd, 2025. Aaron, Mante, joins us now. Aaron, thank you very much, my dear friend, for accommodating my schedule.

I have a lot of different topics to pick your brain on. Let's start with the killings. off the coast of Venezuela. Yesterday, the United States Navy announced that at some point, either yesterday or in the days preceding, it had blown up a speedboat carrying 11 purportedly Venezuelan persons whom the government said were, quote, narco-terrorists on their way to the United States to deliver a cash of some sort of a controlled dangerous substance. No change. charges were filed. No arrests were made. They were just blown out of the water. As you and I are speaking, you're seeing the film, the footage of what happened to it. There it is. An American naval ship destroyed this boat and killed everybody that was on it. What kind of fidelity to the Constitution? What kind of a presidency does this? Well, a presidency that is no fidelity to the Constitution, but fidelity to longstanding

plans for regime change in Venezuela. Recalled that in Trump's first term at the behest of people like Marco Rubio, Mike Pompeo, and John Bolton, Trump launched a coup attempt in Venezuela, seizing, stealing Venezuelan state assets, including its oil company, and trying to install a puppet Juan Guaido. And the main strategy there was to just destroy the economy. through not only stealing Venezuela's resources, but imposing murderous sanctions. And the second Trump term, now these back in office, they've taken to surrounding Venezuela with thousands of Marines sending, you know, naval warships are on there to intimidate the government and try to foment more unrest.

Now it looks like as part of this, they're going after boats leaving Venezuela, whom they claim are drug dealers. And whether that's true or not, it doesn't really matter. There's no legal basis at all for launching military strength. strikes on the ship. And of course, we shouldn't even assume that there were drugs on this boat until there is more evidence. But even if that does emerge, I mean, I think you'd agree, this is completely illegal, right? It's absolutely illegal. It's an act of murder. If everything the government says were true, if these were people who wished us harm, if they had a huge

cash of drugs, what should the government have done? Waited until it got into American waters or waters that the U.S. claims, stop the boat, search the boat. It could have gotten a search warrant from a federal judge in Miami, searched the boat. If there are drugs, there seize the drugs, and arrest the people on it. Instead, they perform a pre-conviction, extrajudicial execution for a crime, even if charged and convicted, that doesn't carry the death penalty. So, I mean, Trump got away with murdering General Soleimani in the first term. how many people is he going to murder in the second term?

There's a long record of this. Some of the people who served in Trump's first administration were involved in the dirty war against Nicaragua in the 1980s, and it was there that the U.S., the Reagan administration, mined the harbors of Nicaragua. And that was later ruled by the International Court of Justice to be an act of international terrorism. And the U.S., of course, ignored the ruling.

But that established a long-term precedent by the U.S., that goes back even before them, but this is just part of that trend of the U.S. self-declared right to use violence in Central America against governments it's trying to destabilize. And so this is an outgrowth of that. And I just worry about what's next. I mean, the people in Washington and the Trump camp are obsessed with regime change in Venezuela. For Marco Rubio, this is what I think gets him up every morning is the dream of overthrowing Maduro. because Maduro, you know, is the head of a state that has a lot of oil, the world's most valuable oil reserves, according to some estimates, and then be trying to overthrow his government. That's why they recently imposed, you know, doubled the bounty on Maduro's head, falsely claiming

he's the head of a narco trafficking operation. Well, meanwhile, so many U.S. clients in Central America over the years have been the actual narco traffickers. After the U.S. back to coup in Honduras, the new government was. was heavily involved in narco-trafficking. My colleagues at the Gray Zone did a lot of reporting on this. The Contras in the 1980s, whom the U.S. was supporting to overthrow the government in Nicaragua, they were allowed to fly drugs on CIA chartered planes to finance their operations.

So this whole thing, at top of being flagrantly illegal, just wreaks of hypocrisy. But even if these guys were delivering drugs to compatriots in the U.S., It's a crime. It's not an act of war. Sure. I mean, and the president, in defiance of a ruling from a federal judge in California yesterday, still thinks he can use the military for ordinary law enforcement. Here's President Maduro responding to all this.

Chris, cut number 11. Eight formidable military ships carrying a substantial arsenal of 1,200 missiles, along with a powerful nuclear submarine, are currently targeting the nation of Venezuela. It is an utterly extravagant, completely unjustifiable, and profoundly immoral threat, a truly unacceptable and dangerous proposition. And truly, absolutely criminal, utterly bloody. Absolutely criminal.

They have wanted to move forward with what, they call maximum pressure, in this case military, and in the face of maximum military pressure, we have declared maximum readiness to defend Venezuela. Mr. President Donald Trump, you need to watch out, because Marco Rubio wants to stay in your hands with blood with South American Caribbean Venezuelan blood. They want to drag you into a blood bath and have your left. name, Trump, be stained with blood for all eternity, with a massacre against the people of Venezuela, with a terrible war against South America and the Caribbean, because this would be a full-scale war

across the entire continent. They want to stain Donald Trump's hands with blood. What is Rubio's hand in all of this, as you understand, at Aaron? I think he's running point on this. As you know, he comes from Florida. That's where he was elected senator. And Florida is the heart of the regime change lobby for Central America, home to a number of exiles from countries like Cuba and Venezuela, who are dedicated to overthrowing the governments that they have long been opposed to in their home countries. And so that's who Rubio represents. That's the basis for the coup attempt in

in Trump's first term. Mark Rubio was very heavily involved in that. And so this is the agenda that he's now pushing. I'd love to hear the take of another Trump cabinet member. That's Tulsi Gabbard. In the first term, Tulsi Gabbard was a vocal critic of the Rubio Trump effort to overthrow the government of Venezuela. She called the disastrous. Now she's serving as Trump's director of national intelligence. What does she have to say about all of this? Well, so far it's not very encouraging. She fired some intelligence officials who had challenged the Trump Rubio fantasy that, like, Maduro is sending gangs, heading gangs and sending them into the United States. And when intelligence established, if there's no basis for that, the intelligence

officials who were apparently behind this assessment were fired by Tulsi Gabbard. So so far, by all publicly available indications, Tulsi Gabbard is going along with the same regime change agenda in Venezuela that she vocally opposed in Trump's first term. One has to wonder what she's doing in the Trump administration unless she's just had this radical transformation in her thinking. I mean, her statements on the floor of the House of Representatives, her other public statements, her voting record in the House of Representatives did not give any indication that she would become a neocon, which apparently she's on the verge of doing now. I know she was at Ron Paul's 90th birthday party, I was invited and couldn't make it. She apparently made a lovely speech there

in his behalf. Isn't it odd to honor the country's foremost libertarian, they invite the country's leading spy? You can't make this up. I told the people that invited that said, you've got to be kidding. And she's there and you let me speak. Maybe you don't want me. I won't remind her about the Fourth Amendment. Well, just, you know, this is one word. It was important when she went to Congress earlier this year and said Iran is not working on a nuclear weapons program. That's the U.S. intelligence assessment. I'm sure she was under pressure to say otherwise, and she did it.

So in all these situations, you have to acknowledge all the things worth criticizing, but also recognizing that there are bright spots. And I think Tulsi Gabbard saying that was one of them. And it was humiliating for her when Trump got up and said, I don't care what she says, because he was determined. to bomb Iran anyway. But the fact that she said, I think, was significant. And I wonder if someone else in her position wouldn't have even said that. I agree with you.

I nicely put. Moving to Ukraine, do you sense that Ukrainian elites, military, diplomatic, government officials, not President Zelensky. Recognize that the end is near? They are a mixed bunch. I mean, certainly there are some Ukrainian elites who want an end to this war and that reflects recent public polling, but the people around Zelensky, it's hard to get a grasp on them. I mean, what's very clear is that after initially

trying to fulfill Zelensky's election mandate back in 2019 to make peace with the Russian-back rebels and the Donbos, initially Zelensky did make some effort. But after the ultra-nationalist, the banderites in Ukraine threatened him, had violent protests, and after the U.S. offered him no support, and, in fact, encouraged the band-to-right agenda to sabotage the Minsk piece, of course. Zelensky stood down, and ever since that has been speaking in the language of the ultra-nationalists about, oh, these people are all brainwashed in eastern Ukraine, and if you don't like you here, go live in Russia. So, and Zelensky, in his public state, it just seems completely delusional about how

Ukraine offers the West security, and that's why you have to give us more weapons and more sanctions. He's become really one note. And I don't see any public indications of people around him are pushing back on this. There seems to be a little bit of a power struggle between himself and Zalusini, the former Ukrainian military chief who is now the purported Ukrainian ambassador to London, although I don't really know what he's doing in that position. And he's been rumored to be a challenger to Zelensky,

but he's even more of a banderite than Zelensky is. Zelensky was pushed into, you know, bowing down to the ultra-nationalist after they threatened his life. The illusion is a card-carrying member. He has portraits of Bandera. So I'm not sure if, you know, if Zelensky were to leave, his top rumored replacement would be any more accommodating and certainly any more in touch with reality. The Bandarites probably would never acknowledge that Ukraine's military's backs are to the wall.

They're so ideologically driven. They're hardly realists. Yeah, that's probably right. And they contain the most motivated fighters. Whereas Ukraine to fill its ranks right now, we've all seen the videos of people being kidnapped in front of their families and also now videos of people being shot as they try to flee the country. Although recently, Ukraine let a certain category of people, men under 22,

they let them leave for the first time. And a lot of people took advantage of that. So it's dire. But you do have in the Banderites a motivated fighting force who really believe in their ideology, in their ideology, that, you know, Ukraine is a particularly form of Ukrainian, and there's no room for ethnic Russians, millions of them in the eastern Donbos. Because of that, they're prepared to fight on. Aside from the opening up of lines of communication, which had been closed down by the Biden

administration between the United States and Russia, what was accomplished by the Putin-Trump meeting in Anchorage, Alaska? that furthered the cause of peace in Ukraine? Well, I think you identified the key accomplishment, which is just talking, which I think is better than the Biden policy, do not engage, which was the mantra of Anthony Blinken.

But, yeah, aside from that, not very much, although the one shift came from Trump. Before Alaska, Trump was saying that there has to be a ceasefire, agreed to by Russia, or else they're going to face consequences. He dropped that after Alaska. And I think he dropped that because he was told by the Russia what their red lines are and also what the reality on the ground is and the Russians feel is if they had the advantage,

as they always did because they're a much bigger country with a lot more military capability than Ukraine has, no matter how many weapons the U.S. and their allies pour in. So aside from Trump's shift in dropping his demand for an immediate ceasefire, now much has changed. And there's no indication to me that Trump has the fortitude to go further than that to try to reach a broader, peace deal, because part of the problem for Trump is, if he reaches a broader peace deal with Russia,

he's going to have to address some of the policies that he enacted that made this problem even worse, namely in his first term, under the sage advice of John Bolton, he tore up the INF Treaty, which had eliminated an entire class of nuclear weapons between the U.S. and Russia. And Russia is saying we have to address this because this is a threat to our security. Is Trump going to want to address a threat that he created, I don't see much of an indication of that. So as of right now, Trump's operating policy seems to be just let them fight on and maybe that will convince Ukraine eventually to surrender. But I don't think he's going to be going out of his way to make a deal with Russia. Before we jump to Israel, and with my apologies for going back to Venezuela, Chris found

a clip of Chelsea Gabbard from 2019, which I think you'll find. very interesting. I also wanted to ask you just briefly about what's going on in Venezuela. It seems like the U.S. is really pushing for a coup there. Even Bernie Sanders has said that Venezuela needs to accept humanitarian aid and stop cracking down on protesters. So I just would like your own perspective. I mean, is there a humanitarian crisis in Venezuela and should the U.S. be doing something about it? You know, we are hearing stories every day about the challenges and the suffering that the Venezuelan people are going through. The United States should not be intervening in what is happening in Venezuela.

Only the Venezuelan people can be the ones to determine who their leader should be and the path forward for themselves and for their country. There you have it. I can't imagine she's going to say the same thing today. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And look, Trump appealed to a lot of people. people by making them believe that he shared that same agenda. Right. You know, we're done meddling in other countries, other countries. It's their

right to pick who their leaders should be. I mean, there's no record of his to back that up, especially in his first term, where as we talked about, he launched a coup in Venezuela. But again, campaigning against Joe Biden, who is a career neocon, diehard regime change fanatic. Trump was able to do again exploit that and position himself as being anti-regime change and anti-analyst war. But after coming into office, it's just one more con. And Tulsi Gabbard, that Tulsa Gabbard we see there is nowhere to be found. Moving on to Israel, Ha Aretz reports that the chief of the military, the chief of the spy agency, Netanyahu's personal national security advisor and his foreign minister all profoundly disagree with his plans to invade an occupied

Gaza. How serious is the resistance to him? I don't think it's that serious. This strikes me as performative because if they're really against this, why aren't they resigning? As Israel terrorizes the people of Gaza, they've just forced tens of thousands

of more people to flee their homes by bombing not their homes. They're tents where people are displaced. Gaza City is being subjected now to daily terror. You can see some of the carnage on social media, but that doesn't even capture all of it. So where are the resignations? I don't see any. So to me, this strikes me

is just a lot of performance. And look, up to this point, we've heard stories that the Israeli officials being against Netanyahu and Biden and Trump being frustrated with Netanyahu, but what has actually been happening on the ground? Unrelenting, sadism, massacres by Israel, and no one's resigning over it. So I don't think Netanyahu is facing any threat. Your colleague at the Gray Zone, Kit Clarenberg, who gives every indication of being a superb investigative reporter. Yes. Recently had a very detailed piece about the British, the BBC, secretly placing people in other media entities in order to neutralize their position on. the slaughter in Gaza. Can you enlighten this on this? Do I have the guts of the story correct?

The stories by Kit Clarenberg, it's based on leaked documents showing that an arm of the BBC is sort of like a, it's like a charity wing of it, has been used, yeah, for information operations to deploy around the world, especially in countries like Ukraine and, you know, shape media messages in the interest of the British government. It just underscores yet again as if we needed more proof that the BBC, which is funded by the British state, acts as an arm of the British state. And there's been many stories in the gray zone about this. And they do this not only through the BBC, but through working with partner organizations like Thompson Reuters. Also groups like Ballincat, which is billed to the Western public as this scrappy group of open source investigators when it really is a troll farm. It's a propaganda operation that especially targets designated enemies of NATO and covers up for Western crimes.

And I have personal experience of this when I covered the cover up at the OPCW, the world's top of chemical weapons watchdog, which exposed that Syria under Assad was basically accused of a chemical attack. And Bellingcat, funded by the British government, a partner with various British government cutouts and also funded by the National Endowment for Democracy, was basically accused of. integral to that. So Kate Clarenberg's latest story, just it's more evidence that what's called our public media is ultimately, and so often used to state media to advance the agendas of the governments that funded. Are there British, we know MI6 works with Ukrainian intel and CIA, and we know that American military are somewhere in Germany, may be physically present in Ukraine, but certainly in Germany, working with Intel to identify Russian targets for the Ukrainians to attack. Are British military, as far as we know, doing the same?

I think that's a fair bet. There was that leaked phone call from German officials last year, I believe, in which they talked about how British officials, German officials, maybe I have the countries wrong, but NATO military officials were helping to, manage the weapon systems that were used to target Russia. So, yeah, it's absolutely a safe bet that NATO military officials are still on the ground and they're still involved in targeting Russian forces. Thank you, Aaron.

Always a pleasure, my dear friend. Again, it was great being with you at that conference we did two Saturdays ago. And thanks for your time. Thanks for accommodating my schedule. We'll see you next week. Sounds good. Thank you, Judge. Thank you.

And coming up later today, Aaron's colleague at 1 o'clock, the one and only, Max Blumenthal, at 2 o'clock. Colonel Karen Koukowski at 3 o'clock, Phil Giraldi. Judge Napolitano for judging freedom. Thank you.