Judging Freedom - Glenn Greenwald: Power Unchecked Destroys Freedom

Episode Date: January 8, 2026

Glenn Greenwald: Power Unchecked Destroys FreedomSee 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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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 our judging freedom. Today is Thursday, January 8th, 2026. My friend is known throughout the world. My guest today is Glenn Greenwald. Glenn, you are a journalist, a constitutional lawyer, a defender of freedom, and in those three categories, you are the gold standard. next to a Webster's unabridged where it says personal courage should be a picture of Glenn Greenwald. Welcome to this program. We've known each other for so long.

We've interviewed each other many times, but it's a thrill to have you here on this show at this time on this day. Yeah, thank you for those nice words. I'm a big admirer of your work, too, and I'm thrilled to be here. Thank you. Thank you, Glenn. Before we get to Venezuela and ICE, murdering an innocent lady in Minneapolis. Let's talk big picture.

Does the Constitution still work as an instrument to restrain the government? The reason why I want to say yes, and I guess the reason if you force me to into a binary choice of yes or no, I probably would say yes, is because it's just too grim and nihilistic to say no, because if you say no, you're essentially saying the game is over. the fight is lost. And I think anybody who does what you do for a living or what I do for a living,

people who watch inherently believe that's not the case. And so obviously the Constitution, as the founders and framers of it understood, doesn't really have a self-enforcement mechanism in it. As Benjamin Franklin said, it all depends on whether you fight for it and keep it. But I do think that it still provides the necessary guidepost better than anything else does, although it's certainly being undermined and eroded,

and has been for a while before Donald Trump, obviously, it's that I think are very disturbing. The enforcement mechanism contemplated by Madison and Jefferson, of course, was a secession, but that was invalidated by the North's victory in the Civil War. I suppose formally the Constitution were. We still have three branches of government. We still have the electoral college. We're still in the Senate and the House.

We still have an unelected judiciary that's supposed to protect us from the excesses of the other two bodies. But functionally, wouldn't the observation be fair that power has migrated to the presidency and away from the Congress and to a certain extent, even away from the courts? Absolutely. You know, when I first started writing about politics, doing journalism, decided that I wanted to leave the law in order to do that, it was 2005. And I had been disturbed for a couple of years before that. You don't just wake up and decide to do that by several things, but principally by the fact that the war on terror and the way in which 9-11 had been exploited had ushered in this kind of model of executive power that was vastly more. potent and even bordering on unlimited, such a far deviation from what the Constitution contemplated, from what the founders of our republic ever envisioned. And I think even as we move

further and further away from 9-11, which at that point had been the precipitating event that caused it, executive power for a lot of reasons has become more and more expanded, less and less limited and then Donald Trump, especially in the second term, for actually reasons that I think are valid if you want to talk about the reasons. But he came in, I think, and his allies as well, principally with the role of preventing any checks on presidential power. And he's been remarkably successful for a lot of different reasons in doing so where you could make the point, the argument, I think quite validly, that the presidency might be at its highest peak of power, you know, maybe with the exception of the Civil War to which you just referred when Lincoln did things like suspend habeas corpus.

But we barely have a Congress that does anything. As you see with Venezuela, they're just completely irrelevant to any of the decision making. And the courts have become increasingly deferential to the president and a whole wide range of issues where they ought not to be. And so, yes, this power is migrating more and more to the presidency. Well, look at what the Bush administration did. And you, one of the reasons I love you and admire you so much as you're not just a journalist, you actually bend history. I mean, largely because of you and your colleagues, the great Edward Snowden,

was able to reveal the nature and extent of mass undifferentiated warrantless spying. Andy's still alive to talk about it. I mean, I'm not going to ask you the details about. that because it's been well documented. There are movies about you and a great documentary about it. But were you surprised when you learned about this? And he said, you're going to have to meet me in Hong Kong, and I'll give you all this information.

Well, it's interesting. The reason he chose me is the journalist who thought he wanted to work, other than the fact that he wanted to avoid corporate media, because he realized that had he gone to the New York Times, the Washington Post, NBC News, they would have gone to the White House. Maybe they would have published one story, maybe two. The White House would have told them your endangering lives if you tell the American people that we are spying on them in mass without warrants.

And he would have unraveled his life for nothing. He wanted to choose somebody kind of with one foot in mainstream media, but one foot very much outside. But also because right from the beginning, when I mentioned that I had started writing about politics in 2005, there was an NSA scandal back in 2005 that has kind of been forgotten about in the wake of the Snowden reporting. where the New York Times revealed, and they had learned it a year and a half before, but got convinced by the White House not to publish it, that George Bush and Dick Cheney, right after 9-11, had authorized the NSA to spy on American citizens without the warrants required by the FISA law.

And the argument at that time, and this was Dick Cheney's lifelong project, was Congress has no power to limit anything that the president does in the area of national security. So even though Congress had passed a law, the FISA law in 1977, requiring war. to spy on Americans for counterintelligence purposes. They just declared that law null and void. And so I became very interested in NSA spying, but it was extremely difficult to find anything out because everything was designated, top secret.

And Edward Snowden was the courage that we needed to say, I'm willing to unravel my life, risk my liberty in order to show my fellow citizen. I'm not sure if I've frozen or if you've frozen because I don't hear you, Glenn. Maybe if you hear me, you need to reconnect to us. You were talking to us about Snowden and his courage and the precursor to Snowden, which was the revelation by the New York Times of the initial order by Bush to the NSA to spy on Americans without even going to the FISA Court.

I remember one of my friends who's now retired, but working at the NSA at the time, telling me when I was at Fox that the head of the NSA, it might have been Mike Hayden, who said, just spy on everybody, just to get all the information you can, capture everything, we'll worry about what's lawful later. Do we still have Glenn back, Chris? No, all right. Well, we'll see what we can do about it. When Glenn does, come back, of course, we will be talking about presidential killing, which goes back to, well, it goes back to Abraham Lincoln, but in the modern era goes back to Barack Obama killing Anwar Alaki, an American, and his 16-year-old son, also an American, President Trump killing General Soleimani, and, of course, Trump now killing these fishermen on the fisherman. on the fishing boats and claiming that they are drug smugglers. Should we stay on or should we start all over, Chris? Do we know if he's coming?

There he is. Okay. All these things happen. So I presumed to say what I thought you were going to continue saying, talking about Snowden. But let's jump to presidential killing. and what we can do about it. I mean, this is culminated over the weekend

with the killing of over 100 people in Venezuela in order to kidnap President Maduro and his wife. It was preceded by the killing of 105 or 110. We don't even know the number of the fishermen on fishing boats in the Caribbean. What can stop Trump? Well, this is, I think, such an important point to emphasize about all this,

which is that I think a lot of Americans might wonder what gives Donald Trump the right to just go and bomb and kill whoever he wants off the coast of Venezuela by alleging these people are quote unquote narco-terrorist but showing no information. Doesn't Congress have to authorize military action? Unfortunately, the entire legal infrastructure that was enacted in the wake of 9-11 has never been rescinded. And although the authorization to use military force that was designed to let us, the United States go into Afghanistan in order to get al-Qaeda was very narrowly constructed. It said we authorized military force to target the people responsible for the perpetrating of the 9-11

attack. Over the years, it has been radically expanded to include groups that weren't even in existence during 9-11, including ISIS. There was never, never knew any authorization. And it's basically now just this kind of carte blanche blank check law that says, as long as the a president calls somebody a terrorist, you can just go ahead in without Congress, without a public debate, activate the military, and go attack them and kill them. And this was something that a lot of conservatives joined me and supported me when I was objecting to in the Obama years when he was targeting even American citizens with no due process under these authorities.

And then Trump gets in and calls what at most are drug dealers, calls them narco-terrorist kind of invents a new term for it. And now suddenly they're terrorists and the entire war and terror structure is applied. And Congress does nothing in response. There's very little media pushback. That's what I think is so alarming. So Trump argues that the delivery of cocaine to the United States is the moral equivalent of a war. But the use of an armada of 15 or 20 ships and two or 300 troops.

and 150 helicopters and the killing of 100 military and civilians in Caracas in order to kidnap the president

is not a war. It's just a law enforcement procedure to bring a fugitive from justice to the courts. I mean,

you can't even say this with a straight face. Right. And, you know, I think one of the things that if you watch politics long enough, and I don't mean just watch it, but really delve into it, that you have to accept is that war propaganda is extremely potent.

It's very much, it's something it's been, it's a science that's been cultivated over centuries. It's accelerated rapidly over the last, say, five decades with the advent of modern media, television, and then the internet. And it's really designed to stimulate our most primal tribalistic instincts, which we all have. And so if you, you know, it's kind of the same formula that makes Marvel movies so popular. you tell someone, here's the bad guy. The bad guy is doing really terrible things. We're the good guys. We're going to go and, you know, blow things up and kill people.

And eventually we're going to liberate the innocent victims from the bad guy. We're going to vanquish the bad guy. That shows that we're the heroes. It's a very appealing iconography. The problem is it very often. In fact, I would say almost always bears little relationship to reality. So you can make all these rational arguments about the fact that nobody ever claims. previously that the overdose problem in the United States, which is my mostly due to fentanyl,

came from Venezuela, which produces almost no fentanyl. Even in terms of cocaine, a small percentage that enters the United States comes from Venezuela, less than 10%. Even on top of that, we've proven that the drug war trying to bomb drug supply out of existence is a gigantic failure. All right, here we go again. The drug war clearly is a failure. The president is trying to kill people.

in order to prevent Americans from voluntarily taking whatever they want to take. Obviously, you shouldn't take fentanyl and you shouldn't take cocaine because it's going to harm you, but you own your own body and you have the right to put into it whatever you want. And the last time I checked there was nothing in the Constitution that gives the President the power to interfere with that. Certainly nothing in the Constitution that gives them the power to interfere with it using deadly force. Chris, do we have any word from Glenn's people? No, okay, all right. Well, we are only about 10,000 miles apart, so I guess this keeps happening. I've been very upset, not only, of course, at the killings of the boat people by the president, not only at the invasion unsanctioned by the Congress or the United Nations into Venezuela. I've been quite upset at this murder in Minneapolis, which the Trump administration wants us to believe was an act of self-defense. You're going to see soon, not here, we have one version here, but you're going to see soon all of the various videos from different angles of this event.

And you will see that they show that the cop was not in the path of the car and that the lady driving the car had turned the wheels in an effort to avoid him. him and get away from him, but he killed her by shooting her in the head, nevertheless. This lady, of course, whose husband had passed away, her second husband, her first husband had divorced her. This lady now leaves behind three children. Here we go. Now, you can't see the killer at this point. He is in front of the car. Glenn, you're back with us. We're just watching Minneapolis in slow motion, and you will see she's backing up here. Now watch her wheels turn radically to the right so that she can avoid the cop in front of her. There you see his legs. He's not in her path, but he puts a bullet in her head nevertheless. As you were coming back

on Glenn, I was lamenting about how sad and sick society is that conservative Republicans cheered on by the president and his Secretary of Homeland Security claimed that somehow this is self-defense and therefore lawful. Well, you know, I think it's related to what we were describing earlier about Venezuela and going back to the war on terror and this idea that our government can just kill whoever it wants. This is a very common theme in history that if you're an empire, You're constantly at war.

It makes your society more vulgar, more crude. You're constantly dehumanizing other people in order to justify the eradication by the state of human life, getting the population to cheer for it. And this is kind of what ended up happening yesterday. Immediately everybody polarized across partisan lines. And if you're a Republican, if you support ICE, you immediately justified it. And I think when the identity of the victim emerged, even though it shouldn't be relevant, politically it was. This is a white woman, an American citizen, somebody with no real criminal record.

She's pretty obviously a activist for left-ling politics, but not a violent or aggressive or law-breaking person. She's there to be a legal observer, which happens a lot with protests. They always have legal observers to give protesters advice about their rights, which is something that you see at every protest. I think what likely happened was she panicked when these ICE agents, who are masked and are supposed to be targeting illegal immigrants in the United States. Not American citizens came up to her car and tried to basically yank her out of her car, and she panicked and tried to flee. She wasn't tried to kill anybody so obviously.

As you said, the tires were pointed to the right. I do think we should have a full investigation before we reached definitive conclusions. The police soft vice agent has a right to that. But this idea that we're going to immediately cheer for masked agents of the state who are armed, controlled by Washington on the streets of the United States, putting a bullet into the head of an American woman who's driving in the suburbs of Minneapolis, that is a sign of some serious spiritual and nationalistic and cultural sickness. And I do think it emerges out of this war mentality. It's also a violation of the government's own rules. Here's John Miller. I don't always

agree with John politically. We've been friends for years. He has a vast law enforcement experience as well. as a media presence, explaining and reading verbatim the DHS policy on shooting moving vehicles. Chris, cut number three. If you're confronted by a moving vehicle that could be a threat to you, get out of the way of the vehicle and don't shoot at a car. Now, this is DHS policy. I'm reading to you from DHS policy. DHS law enforcement officers are prohibited from discharging firearms at the operator

of a moving vehicle or other conveyance. A law enforcement officer must take into consideration the hazards that may be posed to law enforcement and innocent bystanders by an out-of-control vehicle, which we just saw the result of that. The point is, unless the person is literally either using the vehicle to ram other people in a terrorist attack, or has a car bomb, or is chasing you with the vehicle in particular, getting out of the way and reducing the tactical exigency where you're not creating a situation where you're forced to fire these shots is what most law enforcement agencies have adopted. Including the law enforcement agency that employed this guy, I received a lot of blowback when this

morning on Newsmax, I said that the state of Minnesota should indict the ICE officer. He has his qualified immunity defenses, but there's also a lot of evidence that this was not justified at all and was some species of manslaughter. I think the thing that is so disturbing about this is there's an obvious political element to it, mainly that ICE has become a kind of law enforcement agency popular on the right. This American citizen who had a bullet put into her head and her life ended is somebody apparently on the left, certainly more left liberal than the, then the, administration. And out of that, it has emerged this idea that that's how we determine whether

she deserves to be killed. She's a left liberal activist who objects to the president's deportation and immigration policies. And therefore, we're going to side with the armed agents of the state instinctively. I mean, the idea that she was trying to run down these ICE agents, let alone that she's a domestic terrorist, a secretary of Homeland Security, Christy Noem, immediately branded her is nauseatingly false, just so obviously not what happened. And even more so than the willingness to sanction the killing by armed agents of the state, ICE agents who really are only supposed to be targeting people in the country illegally, an American citizen, is the fact that there seems to be this political motive,

almost like what we saw with Charlie Kirk, the idea that somebody is adverse to you politically. It's a good thing when they are murdered. And I mean, it becomes even more disturbing when you're talking about the government doing that. Glenn, I know you're in Latin America. Do you ever come up here to the north? Yeah, I'm in the U.S. constantly. I was just there. I actually did a few podcasts, Megan Kelly's show.

I'm going to be in UCLA this Tuesday for a debate. So, yeah, I'm in the U.S. You know, constantly. Please let us know if you're going to be in New York City or the New York area. It would be great to see you again. Thank you very much for your time. Thank you for all the great work you do. You're still the gold standard when it comes to journalists who defend personal liberty.

I do my best to emulate you. That's very nice of you to say. Thank you so much. Thank you. All the best, my dear friend. And coming up at 2 o'clock this afternoon on all of these topics, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, and at 4 o'clock, Professor John Mearsheimer. Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom.