Judging Freedom - Jenin Younis : Taking on the Feds When They Steal Freedom

Episode Date: September 21, 2026

Jenin Younis : Taking on the Feds When They Steal FreedomSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Undeclared wars are commonplace. Pragically, 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 have to alter or abolish the government? 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 Monday September 21st 2026 Janine Yunus joins us us now. Janine is a pioneering civil rights lawyer who believes like your humble correspondent that the Bill of Rights mean what they say. Of interest to everyone watching us now is Janine's best known client is our friend and colleague, Max Blumenthal. Janine, it's a pleasure to have you here. I'm going to ask you about the Max Blumenthal case, what they took from him, what they did to him and what the constitutional implications are.

But before I do, here's Max in his own words. This is just released a few minutes ago, though I think it was taped a little while ago. My friend and former colleague Tucker Carlson asked him what happened at the airport. Here's what Max gave as his answer. Cut number seven. Mr. Blumenthal, and they said, we've been watching you on Judge Napolitow. I watched your last appearance on Judge Napolitow referring to Judge Andrew Napolitow. But kind of like, you know, tap on the shoulder, like big brothers watching. And I remember those

names, I actually didn't recognize them until afterwards. One of them was Susan Benjamin, which happens to be the birth name of Code Pink, co-founder Medea Benjamin. And then the other names were like Arab names or Muslim names. And I think one of them might have been Mahmoud Khalil, who is now, was like, arrested and was one of the Columbia students who was arrested and they tried to deport him and put them in an ice facility for a long time. I didn't know. But it signaled to me that once it started, it started to all make sense once I saw what they were doing.

Israel's in charge now, and they want some, they want to crackdown. They want to criminalize activism and even journalism that contravenes their objectives. I have heard, and people watching the show have heard, Max Blumenthal make this argument. and of course what happened to him is reprehensible. What did they physically do to him?

What did they take from him? What do you seek back from them in the lawsuit? So they took his two smartphones, which he had taken with him to Iran and presumably had information about his sources and that he had been reporting on. They took the phones and then after we filed a motion for return of the phones

under a provision of federal criminal law, they actually called him and offered to give them back. but we were seeking anything that they had extracted from the phones too because we don't know if they took data off or even, you know, put tracking devices on if they were trying to get information from the cloud. So we are still seeking to learn what they did with the phones, what they might have gotten off them, and then we're seeking declaratory and an injunctive relief. That means basically an order from a judge saying that this violates the Constitution and you can't do it anymore. And I'm going to guess because of another clip from Tucker Carson, which we'll play in a few, minutes that they told them that because he was within 400 miles of a border, the Fourth Amendment didn't apply and they could do whatever they wanted and he had no defenses. Did they give him that

nonsense? So he didn't actually tell me that, but they very well might have. And this is a big problem. So I actually just filed on Max's behalf an amicus brief in the Supreme Court for, I'm sure you know, being a judge, but for viewers who might not know, that's a court, sorry, a brief somebody who's not actually a party to the suit, but has an interest in it. So we're arguing that the Supreme Court needs to address this issue. It has not yet. And the various circuits throughout the country, those are the courts of appeal, the federal courts of appeal, have developed different rules about the searches of travelers' cell phones when they come in and out of the United States. But all of them are not consistent with the

Fourth Amendment. They offer varying degrees of protection, but none require a warrant and none really require individualized suspicion, although it's complicated. And that is just is simply not consistent with the protections that the framers of the Constitution provided for us. Or you can say, our God, yeah, our God-given rights that they recognize. I probably have read the Fourth Amendment maybe five, six, seven hundred times in my career. I don't see any exception in there for within 400 miles of the border. I mean, Madison would be turning in his grave if he knew that this is what's been read into it. But I am not surprised because they've been doing this for a long time, and they do this to

to everybody. Have they, have the feds acknowledged that they extracted anything from his phone, or is this one of these things, or everybody's saying, I don't know, I don't know, I just returned the phone to him. No, so they're saying that they tried and they didn't get anything off it, which is interesting. So they're sort of acknowledging that they committed a Fourth Amendment violation, but they're saying we weren't able to because it was too technologically advanced for us. We don't really believe them. And so we're insisting that we need documentation of what happened. They're submitting affidavits from supervisors saying, well, I, you know, I have a sense that they didn't actually get anything off the phone, but we want logs, you know, we want

records, and we want to know exactly what happened to the phone. So we're not going to let this go. Fortunately, you have a judge who has a reputation for not being afraid of the federal government. That's right, Judge Brinkema. And so we actually had an early hearing in front of her, And she said this case, it looks like the government violated the Fourth Amendment. And this also raises First Amendment concerns because Max might have been targeted because of his views. Laura Lumer, as I'm sure he's discussed on the show, has been all over Twitter saying that he was a spy, that he needed to be investigated, dragged off the plane by U.S. Marshals, and then took credit for the confiscation of his funds. So that's really not okay. We know that she has Trump's ear.

and if he was targeted for his journalism, that raises additional First Amendment questions. And it's an interesting, I was going to say it's an interesting interplay between the First and the Fourth Amendment because it shows how when there aren't rules protecting you from the search, the government can abuse your, you know, can use its power to then target you for your views. That's why, you know, these rights are all interconnected. Right. So the audience knows that we're talking about. if the government makes a decision based on the content of speech, whether it's to harass Max Blumenthal or kick Caitlin Collins from CNN out of the White House,

it's illicit because the government may not make any decisions under the First Amendment based on the content of speech. That's the argument that you're making. Here's what Max, here's what Max told Tucker Carlson about this nonsense that in the, Room he was in and the location of the room, which was somewhere at Dulles International Airport, United States of America, Virginia, USA. He had no constitutional rights. Chris, cut number eight. It happened explicitly because Israel didn't want me reporting from inside Iran, and they thought that I could be, that they could exploit my vulnerability coming back from Iran to have something terrible happened to me in this. area in our country where you are told when you enter you have no constitutional rights,

which is a huge problem. When you're an American citizen. I'm an American citizen. You're an American citizen. You have no rights when you lost a border. You have no other passport, correct? Correct. So how do you forfeit your American constitutional rights?

So once you are called in for secondary inspection or questioning by customs and border protection when you arrive from another country, you know, you get like the red, and then they put your passport in a plastic box and they send you back there, CBP tells you you do not have, you essentially do not have the same constitutional rights. And so, well, I mean,

I give the Trump administration no defense whatsoever, but they have all done this. This is not new. I don't know when this 400 mile nonsense began, but of course it includes the great, population centers of the United States. Just go along the coast. Start with Boston, go down to New York and Washington and Charleston and Miami and Houston and New Orleans

and continue all the way up the West Coast. And you've covered half the population of the United States. The government will say when you're entering the U.S., you have no Fourth Amendment rights. But maybe you can force the Supreme Court to address that. God knows what this court might do, but we might be surprised. Is the Trump administration actively suppressing pro-Palestinian speech by Americans in the United States of America? Yes, the short answer, and I have a longer answer, too. I mean, this has been a problem for a very long time, so the suppression of pro-Palestine speech.

I think that Americans just weren't really very aware of it before October 7th, when a lot of people started to realize the influence. at the Israel lobby and wanted to talk about it. But there have been people who faced very serious professional consequences going back decades, really. But this has all escalated significantly after October 7th and then even more after Trump took office the second time. So there has just been a complete weaponization of government to punish non-citizen pro-Palestine protesters

by using the immigration system, to deport them for anti-Semitism, to punish universities who don't stop pro-Palestine, pro-Palestine protests for not for ostensibly permitting anti-Semitic discrimination. The Department of Justice Civil Rights Division has weaponized its authority to go after business owners who've been critical, politicians who support Israel. I mean, this is just a multifaceted attempt to intimidate people. I mean, we all saw what happened to McElmore very recently, which was not just private,

the decision of private companies that are stadiums. Some of these stadiums are actually publicly funded, and there's interplay between Robert Kraft, who has closed ties to the administration. So this is a very significant issue. Basically, what I do is representing people, I represent people mainly who have been punished for pro-Palestine speech. So I'm very familiar with the issue and the extent to which the civil rights and other law is being weaponized to silence dissent on the subject in the country.

What would happen if a Columbia University student, or if I, as a public figure, walked onto the Columbia campus with a placard that said, free Palestine. Palestinians are entitled to their own state. Well, I can't say exactly what would happen today. But what has happened to people is they've been suspended. They've been put in immigration detention. They have been expelled from the country. It's created a very severe chilling effect. So they have gone after many people, the Trump administration. But you don't even have to go after that many. You just have to punish a few people very severely and then you frighten people into silence. I mean, that was the point of what they did with Mahmoud Khalil, who all he had done was participate in pro-Palestine protest. The same with

Rameza Azturk. The Turkish student at Tufts University, she had only co-authored an op-edad arguing for divestment from Israel that Tufts should divest its funds from Israel. And she was taken by masked men off the street on the way to a Ramadan dinner and put behind bars for weeks and has had to fight to be able to stay in the country. So all you have to do is get a couple of high profile examples like that and it intimidates Americans into silence. It's these are this is a very, very serious threat to free speech. And I can also say I actually started working in the free speech arena during COVID fighting censorship of COVID dissidents, including the current. And I, Jay Batacharya was my client. He's currently the NIH director and have been censored on social media at the hands of the

government. A lot of my allies during that era have completely turned around. That includes Hermit Dillon, who's now number three at DOJ's Office of Civil Rights, basically, and uses most of her time to punish baristas for wearing watermelon pins and that kind of thing. Yeah, yeah. I mean, how does the government use benign appearing civil rights laws to suppress speech it hates and fears? So the Civil Rights Act of 1964, it has various provisions. Title VI applies to universities. And it says basically the universities and colleges that receive federal funding have to

prohibit or work to protect against discrimination on the basis of race, religion, national origin, et cetera. And so what these pro-Israel students and groups are arguing is that pro-Palestine protests are inherently anti-Semitic, saying from the river to the sea, or free Palestine is anti-Semitic. And so by allowing those protests, the universities and colleges are violating Title VI, and so they can be basically prosecuted for violating civil rights law if the recipients of federal funds, which is essentially every university. So they're completely turning civil rights law on its head. What would happen if I stood on the Columbia campus and held a sign that said

Free Palestine? Now, I'm saying Columbia, if I stood on the Princeton campus, not because I'm an alumnus of for instance, but because New Jersey has different laws, it's crystal clear that nobody could lay a glove on me. But something would happen to me if I stood on the Columbia campus, because Columbia would claim, if it didn't get rid of me, Trump would abrogate some of their contracts for research. Do I have that right? Yeah, well, it's hard for me to say specifically what would happen in a certain hypothetical circumstance, but that what you're describing is essentially what's happening. So the government has sued the universities and threatened to withdraw federal funds. So a lot of the universities have simply capitulated and said, okay, basically no more pro-Palestine

protests. We can't risk losing our funds. Some of them have settled. I don't know if you read like the Brown University settlement, which is completely ridiculous. It like requires celebrations of Jewish heritage, no pro-Palestine protests, no more free speech. So the federal government has just used its authority and used its weight to silence free speech, which is the opposite of what it should be doing. There was a time when, I'm thinking of going back to Barry Goldwater, when conservative Republicans were staunch opponents of any kind of censorship. And then the Israel lobby came along, and now these conservative Republicans are the ones who are backing the suppression. How do you account for that change? Or is the answer, the Israel lobby?

Yeah, the answer is the Israel lobby. I mean, as I said, I can tell you, I can give you a list of names of specific people who've just completely switched from you being free speech advocates during COVID to now using their offices to suppress free speech on Palestine or are remaining silent. And I think, frankly, if you're remaining silent during the most egregious free speech violations of our time and you claim to care about free speech, you know, your compromise. So, yeah, I mean, it's money, it's power. People are afraid. They've always been afraid. Obviously, everybody's familiar with John Mearsheimer, since he's a regular on your show.

I mean, he wrote the Israel Lobby, the sort of quintessential book documenting the insane amount of power that the Israel lobby has over members of Congress. They keep people in fear. They make you feel as though your career will be ruined. They tried doing that to me, frankly. And it's actually something that's been very much ingrained in me because my father is Palestinian. And when I was growing up, he said, he grew up, my father grew up under the Israeli occupation and said, you know, you've got to be very careful how you speak about this because they'll ruin your career. So, you know, don't talk about it in public.

And I grew up with a great understanding of the vast power that the lobby wields. And it's just that most Americans just didn't see it until after October 7th because it wasn't an issue for most people, since they didn't care to talk about it. You know, when you and I and Max and others say Free Palestine, we're accused of being anti-Semitic, and that is a paint that they seek to put on us, and it's one they've been using for years. This has nothing to do with Semitism. It has nothing to do with people being Semites. It has nothing to do with the Jewish religion.

It has to do with a public policy of Israel, a current public policy of Israel, which stands for crime, theft of real estate, genocide, and apartheid. But how do you explain the difference between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism? Well, anti-Zionism is opposite. opposition to the concept of a Jewish majority state in the land that is now Israel, Palestine. It's, I mean, I think people would define it differently, to be fair. That's how I would define it. You cannot have, you know, people say Jews are entitled to a homeland just like everybody else.

Why do the Muslims get all these countries and we Jews? We can't have one. I mean, I'm not saying there couldn't have been a hypothetical Jewish state in a land that had been empty. The problem is you want to create a Jewish majority state in a land that was occupied by millions of other people. Well, that will necessarily entail oppressing those people in order to ensure they don't have voting rights in order to keep their population down so they don't outpopulate you. And indeed, that's what we've seen since 1948. So it's played out exactly the way one could have predicted, I think. And a lot of people actually did predict at the time, which is the only way that you can keep this going is through these tactics. And then of course what's going to happen, and I'm never excusing violence against civilians. It's, you know, obviously not

something I would advocate. But what happens in reality, just like it happened during slavery with Nat Turner's slave rebellion and happened in South Africa during apartheid, is that when people are extremely oppressed, at some point they're going to fight back, you know, when you're killing their children, when they don't have any rights to vote for the people who rule over them, when their property can be taken, when they can be beaten and killed with no consequences by the ruling class and the other, you know, ethnicity or religion or however you want to put it, at some point, they're going to say no more. And what can we do? You know, and the, you know, the Israel lobby wants to have it both ways. They want to say, you can't peacefully protest. And peaceful protests in Palestine

have always been met with violence. So they want to have it always. And it's just not realistic. And it's obviously not just. Wow. So let's just get back to Max for a minute. Are you going to be able to take the deposition of Mark Wayne Mullen, the head of the Department of Homeland Security? Because if you do, we would love to have our cameras there. Well, you know, I sure hope so. Actually, often the most fruitful depositions are those of the lower level players because the ones who are high up, don't actually know that much. But I did one of the best moments of my career was I was not the one deposing him, but I was in the room for, depositions of Anthony Fauci for our case against the Biden administration's censorship.

That was very fascinating. So yes, I can only hope we get to depose Mark Wayne Mullen. Well, well, you're doing the work of the angels. You and I were at a gathering with Max and others, Scott Ritter, John Mearsheimer, and others of our friends. And everybody in that room believes that the Bill of Rights means what it says. Yeah. But the people in the government don't. No. The people and the government don't, and I hate to say it, but a lot of our population doesn't, and that's part of the problem as well. I think we really need a return to constitutional principles. And our country is so divided. People hate the other side so much. They'd rather stick it to the Dems or stick it to the Republicans than fight for liberty and a commitment to civil liberties and our Constitution for all of us. And you kind of see it switch each, you know, and I think it just gets more and more brutal every time because the division just grows wider and wider. You're right. I think, let's say your case drags on and Trump is replaced by a liberal Democrat, you know, pick wherever you want. I don't think their attitude about Max or about the border or about the Fourth Amendment will change. You know, there's a, my friend Tom Woods coined a now generic one-liner. No matter who you vote for, you get John McCain.

That's the same thing with civil liberties. No matter who you vote for, you get a DOJ, a D.O.J. A D.H. whoever, whatever we want to call them, that doesn't believe that the Bill of Rights means what it says. No. And I mean, that's why, you know, the framers of the Constitution, as you know very well, were carefully wrote it to ensure that we had a government of limited powers, but that's not what we have at all. I mean, what we have right now, the federal government, there is no resemblance to what the framers intended. I mean, it's a behemoth. It has way more power, you know, I mean, I could go on forever about this, but the interpretations of the Commerce Clause have allowed the federal government. to have so much more power than it should.

The executive branch has just completely has gotten out of control. It has way more power than it ever should. And there are no checks and balances. I do have some faith in the courts. And that's why I do what I do. There are still good federal judges and get some good decisions. Not across the board, but some. All right.

Well, best of luck to you. Max talks about his case frequently. He's on this show at least once a week. He's not only a professional colleague of mine, but a dear friend. And we do whatever we can to publicize these excesses. We usually cover just foreign affairs, but because this is family with Max, and because I had such a happy encounter running into you in Chicago on Thursday, we're thrilled to be able to have you on to discuss this.

When there is more news in Max's case, or when you have other cases that would be of interest to our audience, Please let us know we'll be happy to have you back on and discuss them. I will, and thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate the opportunity. Thank you, Janine. All the best to you. Thank you. Sure.

Coming up next, if you're watching us live in 37 minutes, what lies should we expect out of the mouth of Benjamin Netanyahu when he speaks at the UN on Wednesday? Who better to discuss this than Professor Jeffrey Sachs? Three o'clock right here. Justin the Paltana for judging freedom.