Judging Freedom - JOE KENT: President Trump was Warned

Episode Date: August 26, 2026

JOE KENT: President Trump was WarnedSee 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. Fragically, 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 had 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 Wednesday, August 26, 2006, Joe Kent, joins us now. Joe is a pleasure, my dear friend. Thank you very much for joining us. Was the Iran War launched with any clear military or political objective as far as you could observe from your position at the time of Director of Counterterrorism? No, as far as I could tell, it wasn't. I think that the Washington or the Wall Street Journal piece that laid out how Tulsi Gabbard warned President Trump about the intelligence community's assessment that Iran was not on the cusp of developing a nuclear weapon and posed no imminent threat.

That was accurate. That had been the intelligence community's assessment for quite some time, and then especially in the lead-up to this last iteration of the war. And I think really quickly you saw the president come out and say, you know, in speak in very like regime-change terms, but then, you know, shifting to saying that we had military objectives. and what we were trying to achieve, other than, you know, saying bumper sticker style statements, like a ram will never have a nuclear weapon, it really was never, you know, quite clear. So I think it's pretty evident that President Trump did not take the advice of the majority of his advisors,

both political appointees and then professional intelligence community. And he was listening to what the Israelis were telling him, that, you know, Iran was teetering on the cusp. There was protesters on the streets, that they were a paper tiger. They hadn't struck us very, they hadn't struck America at all, were American assets at all during the 12-day war. If we hit them now and decapitated the regime, that this would be as easy as Venezuela. And then obviously we can see how that's played out ever since. Why do you think Trump rejected the near universal advice of his own intelligence community?

And you can tell us how many aspects of it there are. We know of 17. Maybe there's more the public doesn't know it, but it was a lot. Why would he reject that consensus developed by you and Tulsi Gabbard from the data they sent you guys and accept what two people told him, Benjamin Netanyahu and David Barnaya, then the head of Mossad? Yeah, I mean, this is the question of this moment right now, and I think this question will actually be studied for quite some time, because President Trump is no fool. He understands that another war in the Middle East, a war if I ran, that it would probably result in a disaster. So why specifically he made the decision that he made, I still truly do not know. I don't know why he even allowed the Israelis to get involved in the 12-day war, why we didn't

meaningfully restrain them, and why he was even tolerating BB giving his sales pitch. When in the first Trump administration, he got the sales pitch and he ignored it and rejected it. But in the lead up to this war, I think President Trump didn't, a big reason why Trump didn't listen to the intelligence community is because the intelligence community did shoot itself in the foot with the Russia gate. So anytime that we would say to President Trump, hey, you know, we have 18 intelligence agencies. That's if you count ODNI as being overall the 17 other ones. And they're all in unison.

They're all saying that there's no imminent threat from Iran, that Iran is not developing a nuclear weapon. It was really easy for other people to whisper in President Trump's ear. And by that, I mean, you know, Benjamin, Yahoo, Mossad, a lot of the prominent Israeli donors to say, hey, you can't trust your own intelligence community. And unfortunately, because the intelligence community, not all of it, of it course, the vast majority of it wasn't part of the Russian Gate hoax,

but because it sort of had that, that yoke already on it, it was very easy for the president to say, like, well, you know, I really can't necessarily trust my intelligence community. Unfortunately, he didn't listen to his own appointee, Tulsi Gabbard, and many others, too. It wasn't just, you know, Tulsi or myself or just a few others. I mean, this has been the intelligence community's assessment, you know, way before we were even back in the Oval Office, you know, even going back to previous administration. the fact that if you hit the Iranians, this exact scenario would play out, especially if you killed the so-called moderate leadership and they were moderate compared to what we have right now.

If you killed them, the Iranian people would rally around the flag. This would bring the hardliners to power. They would then likely attempt to develop a nuclear weapon before they weren't. They would shut down the Straits of Formuz. Iran shutting down the streets of Hormuz has been part of every single war game going back to the 1980s. Iran would use this proxy networks. We were well aware of the proxy networks.

they would hit all of our bases in the Gulf. They would target energy. All of this was known. But for whatever reason, President Trump shows not to listen to that advice. And he listened to, you know, Benjamin Netanyahu and other members of the Israeli government and the donor class. And then I think some of even his, maybe even his own advisors that were saying like, yeah, don't listen to the intelligence community. This is going to be easy. I think there's a certain degree that we did get a little bit high on our own supply, so to speak, after the Venezuela raid, where we thought that our military could go in.

and just topple a government and everything would work out just fine. Did he take into account the war games showing that the Strait of Hormuz would be closed? And did those war games take into account the catastrophic economic consequences that have been visited upon all Americans as a result of it? I have a hard time believing that Donald Trump, the business, man who understands the economy at a macro and micro level that he just didn't understand this. I think because President Trump had resisted the urgings to go to war with Iran in his first administration, especially when we were on the cusp after he killed Qasem Solemani. He understood back then what going to war with Iran would mean.

I mean, he's a president Trump has been talking about Iran's control over the Straits of Hormuz, you know, the value of Karg Island in terms of oil and energy production. So President Trump knows these things. I don't think it's like he simply skipped the brief or like he couldn't find Iran on the map and he didn't understand the value of the Straits of Hormuz. I think he understood all of this. And this, you know, leads us to the fundamental question of like why, despite all of his gut instincts, his previous history, all the data he had available to him, the advisors he had available,

why did he instead, you know, forego all of that and say, I'm going to listen to you what the Israelis want to want me to do. And for the life of me, I still, I don't. know exactly why he chose to go down that path. And especially now that we're almost six months into this thing, he's staying in this conflict. I mean, we go back and forth between we're going to wipe, wipe them off the face of the earth, and we're going to cut a deal with him. We're going to do a blockade. We're going to do economic deed day. But we're staying involved in this conflict when really, I think all of President Trump's business instincts would tell him, hey, I should just walk away from

this and at least reset the negotiations or try a different avenue. Yet, here we are. He's continuing to double and triple down on the same strategy that we've been trying to execute for the last six months. So did the war games take into account that if the naval base at Bahrain was destroyed, which as we know it was, American naval ships would have to go 2,000 miles to get toothpaste. I mean, look, we went through the entire war on terror where the enemy used asymmetric warfare and they didn't hit our combat action troops head on. In some cases, they did. For the most part, they didn't hit our battle-ready guys.

They hit our logistical supply lines. This was the whole IED fight in Iraq and Afghanistan. We knew that our bases in the Gulf, that's what actually powered our fleet and being able to project force. So that should not have surprised anyone either. I mean, if you hit the bases, which is a great asymmetric way to fight, you know, you don't want to have to waste all your missiles on shooting. at the heavily fortified and well-defended, you know, carrier battle group.

But if you hit the bases that aren't well-defended, then you basically neutralize a lot of the threat or at least negate a lot of the threat coming from the carrier battle group. And that's exactly what the Iranians did. And this should not have surprised to anyone. Again, this isn't me saying, like, I'm the only guy who predicted this. Me and, you know, they and Tulsi and a small group of people. No, this was the intelligence community.

This was the Department of Defense. this is CENTCOM, like people knew exactly what was going to happen. If Iran decided to unleash its full capabilities against us, and we knew Iran would unleash its full capabilities against us if we went for a decapitation strike. And on, you know, day one of the war, day two of the war, that's exactly what we did. So again, none of this should have surprised us. Maybe this has happened after you left and you only know about it from public sources. Maybe you have friends on the inside.

maybe it happened before you left. Trump keeps asking about low-yield tactical nuclear weapons. What happens when he asks about that? Does General Kane say, forget about it, or do they explain to him that he could start a conflagration that he wouldn't be able to stop? Well, any good military officer will tell him, hey, sir, this is the capabilities that we have in our arsenal

that are at your disposal as a commander-in-chief. And then if that military officer is fully serving the present to the best of their ability, they will lay out the ramifications, the second and third door effects. Yes, this weapon system, this weapon could penetrate into one of the hardened facilities inside of Iran and give you the desired effect. However, the radiation fallout would kill X amount of civilians, or it would set a precedence. I think this is probably the most alarming. It would set a precedence that using weapons like this is, acceptable and that could have an effect on the battlefield in Russia, Ukraine. It would kind of greenlight

Putin using one potentially in Kiev. Now, I fear, though, that maybe the last part of that brief gets, you know, gets cut off or gets truncated or, you know, the president is impatient and says, like, I just want to hear what the weapon system does. And he doesn't want to hear about the second and third order effects. That's my concern right now. I think the use of nuclear weapons, if you just look at the president's public statements about how he wants to complete and total surrender from Iran. It basically leaves us with two options. We either do a ground invasion, but if you just look at how big Iran is, how many forces we have available, even if we had a coalition like we did going into Iraq, a ground invasion is just not, it's not

going to work. And even if a ground invasion did work, we'd have an insurgency and we just fought, you know, two 20-year insurgencies, and that didn't go well for us. So then if you still say, hey, the way that we need to solve this problem is total surrender, that leads to nuclear weapons very, very quickly. So I know a lot of people. he ever talk about Hiroshima-style nuclear weapons, not low-yield tactical ones, but enormous ones that would kill hundreds of thousands of people? I've never heard him discuss that, no. But the problem is when you say what your objective is, when you say, I want the regime totally destroyed, I want them to surrender. If he speaks in those terms, which he has in the past,

but then when he decided to go into the MOU this summer, it did seem like he had kind of come down from that. And he was like, all right, we just need to get the Straits of Hormuz to open back up again. And there was a ray of hope. But then really, really quickly, you know, we're back to shooting at ships in the Straits of Pormuz. We cut a side deal basically in Lebanon that negated the MOU.

And then we're right back to the saber rattling. So my concern is that when he says, I just need the Iranians basically to capitulate, I need to force my will on the Iranians, total surrender, that the military is going to say, hey, like, we can't do a ground invasion. So here's your other options. And so without him saying, I want something Hiroshima style, we just sort of end up. My other fear, though, is that the Israelis have been very good at coming to President Trump

at exactly the right time like they did when they pitched the whole conflict with the protesters on the streets. We're riding high after Venezuela. I'm afraid that right now, when we're in this almost stalemate where the president wants a solution, but we don't seem to have one, the Israeli's company. to him and just say, hey, like, we could take care of this. You just look the other way. We're our own sovereign country. We're going to go, we're going to go do it. That's my concern. Wow. Has the United States conducted any serious diplomacy to end the war that Trump started, or

are Whitkoff and Kushner, not serious diplomats and not perceived as such by anybody involved in this? Well, I think we've tried, and I think before the 12-day war, I think, the Iranians took Steve Whitkoff seriously. I don't, to my knowledge, Jerry Kushner wasn't that involved in the lead up to the 12-day war. Unfortunately, though, for Whitkoff and Kushner, we've sneak attacked Iran now twice, three times during negotiations by my count. And so I just don't think the Iranians are going to take them seriously, even if you rule out all the other, you know, potential business ties, how close there are with the Israelis, even if they didn't have that baggage. The fact that they've had to be the forward face for American diplomacy with the Iranians

on multiple occasions where we've attacked Iran while negotiations were taking place. Plus, I mean, we killed the Supreme Leader. We killed several of the moderates in the Iranian leadership or let the Israelis do so. And then we, you know, tragically bomb the girls' school. So I think diplomacy, our desire for diplomacy, like we still, Trump still wants to get a deal. So I have no doubt that we have messages being passed, diplomats making calls. But I just don't think that the Iranians think that we're serious. So they don't believe that we're serious. They don't want to get suckered again in another diplomatic ruse. So I don't think that the Iranians are really reaching out much to us. When the MOU was cut, the Iranians, I think they waited to see if we were going to be

serious about it, but then in very, very short order within the matter of less than a week. I mean, we basically negated the MOU. And so now the Iranians are falling back and saying, like, we're sticking with the MOU. If the Americans go back to the MOU, then maybe we can talk about getting the Straits of Hormuz, open back up again in accordance with the MOU. But for right now, I think anything that we would consider to be normal diplomacy is more or less dead.

And a lot of that, too, the Iranians, we killed most of the moderates, and the hardliners are emboldened right now. And the hardliners, I don't think are going to just hand us a deal. I don't think they can. I think the Iranian people right now are not going to accept a deal. with America after the way that we've attacked them multiple times and, you know, the done, killed their supreme leader, et cetera.

Trump very ostentatiously signed the memory of understanding in the palace of Versailles. A. Do you think he read it? It's only two pages. B. Do you think the government, the U.S. government, meant it as a serious agreement with which it would comply as a springboard for further negotiations or just an opportunity for a fig leaf over a ceasefire to regroup militarily? It's hard to say. I mean, the way that we acted right after the MOU, it makes it look like either, A, we didn't read it

and we weren't serious about it, or our government doesn't talk to itself because we had the vice president go and he went out there to sell it publicly. He went and actually spoke very, very harshly to the Israelis, although we didn't follow it with action, so at the end of the day, I don't think the Israelis took it very seriously.

But then we immediately dispatch the Secretary of State, Margar Rubio, Lebanon and he basically cuts a deal that allows the Israelis to stay in Lebanon, which directly conflicts with what was in the MOU. And then same thing in the Straits of Formoos, we immediately start conducting escorts that are outside the parameters of what we signed with the MOU. So, you know, I'm not sure whether it was we simply just didn't read our own agreement, which I have a hard time believing, or if it was just like, hey, the MOU is just going to be

basically, you know, a fig leaf to allow a lot of the oil that was already on the water to quit exit to give a little bit of an extension to the economy. That's what it seems to be right now. And again, we wasted diplomatic capital in all that. We got a temporary gain of like, I think we extended, you know, the energy surplus and the energy economy just by a couple months probably, getting everything that was already on the water out of the straits. But then we went right back to the state that we're in now. So, I mean, we kind of shut ourselves in the foot, we really shut ourselves in the foot diplomatically. Len, I didn't know this, but I saw it in that same Wall Street journal article to what you referred earlier. When the old Ayatollah was assassinated, CIA director

John Ratcliffe apparently told the president, and he found the president at a dinner dance at Mara Lago with 3,000 people, and the president ordered Ratcliffe to announce the killing of the Ayatollah to the crowd there, which applauded. Is that consistent with CIA protocol for the director of the CIA to make an announcement like that and receive applause for it? No, no, it's not. But at the end of the day, the CIA director works for the president. So if the president says, get up there and do it, then that just became the new protocol. Wow.

Any idea, speaking of the CIA director, what he was doing in the Kremlin for four hours yesterday? I don't. I mean, I've seen different news reports here and there. I mean, I would hope, best case scenario, he was over there. you know, hopefully trying to tell the Russians that we're working on the Ukrainians. We're going to try and tell the Ukrainians to stop doing so many strikes inside of Russia against energy targets, civilian targets, and, you know, we'd hope the Russians would do the same. Although I don't think that that's the case.

I think we are trying to get, they're trying to pressure the Russians to put some pressure on Iran, to not support the Iranians. There's rumors of Iran and Russia signing some kind of a joint nuclear agreement in terms of the development of civilian nuclear sites. They had worked on that before together. So I think there's something to that effect is in play. But at the end of the day, if we're trying to tell the Russians to be restrained, I don't think the Russians are going to take us very seriously because President Trump,

as a candidate said that he was going to end the Russia-Ukraine war. He was going to basically take away a lot of the support that were giving the Ukrainians in an effort to get them to the table. We didn't really meaningfully do that. Even though President Trump made some noises and some gestures about trying to do that, we left all the support that we're going to do that. giving the Ukrainians, you know, turned on. We continued to provide a lot of help and assistance to the Ukrainians and they're continuing to strike the Russians. So when we send over officials,

because we haven't really changed the way that we're supporting the Ukrainians in the battlefield, and Ukrainians are now hitting energy targets and civilian targets inside Russia, I just don't think the Russians take us very seriously. This kind of goes back to what Putin has said over and over again publicly. He's like, you know, the president really doesn't have the power. It's the men in the dark suits at the CIA. Those are the guys that really set the policy. And that policy doesn't seem to change. It just seems to be more and more aggression against Russia, which kind of got us to the point we're in right now, where, you know, we're on the cusp of this, the two wars becoming one war and then potentially spilling over into Europe, into NATO countries.

We're also on the cusp of a drastically low military supplies. Can the Pentagon count? How did Hegseth and company, how could they allow American offensive and defensive weaponry be reduced to a catastrophically low number. That's a good question. And exactly how I don't know, I think a big problem that we have writ large of our foreign policy and like our defense thinking in general is that we just believe that we're always going to come out on top,

that we're the superpower, you know, we won the Second World War. And yeah, some of these smaller conflicts haven't gone our way, but if we just would have turned loose to military, we totally could have won. That is, and I spent, you know, over 20 years in the military and in the CIA, and that kind of is our kind of arrogant attitude. And I think the war in Ukraine and then what's taking place right now in Iran really should have been a wakeup call for us, but it doesn't appear that it has been.

You know, that's my most charitable read. I would also say that there is a potential that, you know, as we burn through the sophisticated munitions, a lot of people who think that we should be more aggressive inside Iran and put boots on the ground, their argument is that, hey, all the sophisticated stuff is gone. Now we need to actually make a logistical hubs on one of the islands. to make a logistical hub and take ground on the port there at Bonda, boss, so that we can use some of our more short range, less high-tech weapons systems that we have a bigger inventory of. So I'm not really sure. I think it's probably a combination of the two. Either way, it's incredibly dangerous. Was President Trump adequately warned about the consequences of failure in Iran and the likely failure, or does he just brush it off? Does he not listen?

he was adequately warned and I feel like he could have articulated it had he wanted to. I mean, I think, you know, if he was in private and you said, hey, what could go wrong with this? I think he would lay out this exact scenario because I think he had all the information. I think he's smart enough. He does tend to brush things off and say like everything's going to work out because it always does. I mean, he's very confident in his ability to kind of vibe through it and kind of force his will in the situations. I think a big problem is that President Trump has been able to speak things into existence politically here in America. that's great and that can work in politics, but that doesn't work in a two-way shooting war with

a regional power like Iran. And for Iran, this conflict is existential. They have to prevail. They have to push us off. Otherwise, they feel like we're going to continue to come and pose an existential threat to them. To us, this war isn't existential. And you can see right now the president's already kind of gotten sick of it. He wants it to be over. Pretty pridefully, he wants to hang on to it. Or maybe there's something else, the, you know, the Israeli lobby is influenced. Maybe that's keeping him in the war. But he does, you know, have this overstated and overflated, I think, you know, perception of himself that he thinks that he can just kind of, you know, will our success into existence in Iran. And so far, you know, that that's proven to be not the case. Does the White House recognize that militarily we have lost this war?

The problem is at the White House, there's very few people with, I think, a good understanding of just how limited our military options are that are able to speak directly. to the president or have the courage to speak directly to the president. I think there's a lot of gatekeeping that goes on. So we have the expertise within the defense department at the Pentagon and the intelligence community. There are people who could, if given the opportunity, speak candidly to the president. Now, will the president listen to them and will they be given the opportunity to speak to the president? That's the question. Is it dangerous to have a member of the United States Senate that has no concept of national security by her own? admission. I'm speaking of Senator the present Senator Graham from South Carolina.

Yeah, I mean, considering that the Senate is supposed to be one of the checks on the president just taking us off the war. I mean, yeah, if we actually want the legislative branch to be a co-equal branch of government and to have a balance of power in our country, then our senators and our congressmen should be very well versed in the Constitution and in what's taking place on the world stage, especially when we are engaged literally in two hot wars right now, you know, Russia, Ukraine, what's going on in Iran, and then the ramifications that's going to have in the rest of the globe. She doesn't need to be an Asia-Pacific expert, but she does need to understand what our vital national security interests are, you know, in Taiwan, in the

South Pacific. It's just unacceptable for her to be giving answers like that. I understand when most people vote, especially for, you know, Congress, I ran for Congress myself or for the Senate, they are thinking about like you know very very local issues and not understanding how much power our senators and our congressmen have or should have now a big problem we've had in our country i think you know as long as i've been politically aware definitely post 9-11 is that we've we've basically had congress and and the senate hand over all the powers of war and peace just to the executive branch and and let the president kind of do whatever he wants so uh if we want that to continue then i guess senators like You know, Graham Part 2 are the way to go.

But I think we really need to give a lot of pause when we have elected officials that don't understand their role in, you know, our national security process and how and why we send people off the war. Joe Kent, another fine conversation. Deeply grateful for your time. Thank you, my friend. We'll look forward to seeing you again. Thank you so much, Judge. Great to see you. Sure.

Coming up on all of these topics at 3 o'clock, we're watching us live 34 minutes. from now, the great Phil Giraldi. Judge Napolitano for judging freedom.