Judging Freedom - Judge Napolitano's conversation with Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Episode Date: July 12, 2023

Join Judge Andrew Napolitano in this captivating episode of Judging Freedom as he sits down with Bobby Kennedy Jr., a prominent political figure and activist, to discuss his presidential campaign, the profound influence of his uncle J.F.K. and father Robert F. Kennedy, and his stance on controversial issues such as the potential pardon of Julian Assange.In this thought-provoking conversation, Judge Napolitano delves into Bobby Kennedy Jr.'s motivations for seeking the presidency and explores the enduring legacy of his iconic family members. Listeners will gain insights into how Kennedy's family connections shaped his political aspirations and worldview.The discussion takes an unexpected turn as Judge Napolitano raises concerns about the overreach of the Federal Government, specifically pertaining to personal privacy violations and the surveillance of ordinary Americans. Robert Kennedy Jr. shares his compelling perspective on the need for reorganization within certain federal agencies to protect citizens' rights and address potential government intrusion.Judging Freedom brings together two formidable voices in the realm of law and politics, providing a unique and in-depth exploration of pressing issues facing the United States today. This episode offers listeners an opportunity to gain a deeper understanding of Bobby Kennedy Jr.'s vision for the country and his commitment to preserving individual freedoms.Tune in to this must-listen episode of Judging Freedom to engage in a riveting conversation that spans a wide range of topics, from the intersection of politics and family heritage to the challenges of upholding personal privacy in an increasingly interconnected world.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Welcome to this special edition of Judging Freedom with Judge Andrew Napolitano. The judge's special guest today is Robert F. Kennedy Jr. RFK Jr. is currently running for President of the United States. Although RFK Jr.'s voice has been impacted by spasmodic dystonia, his thoughts and words are loud and clear. And now, Judge Andrew Napolitano. Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Welcome to a very special episode of our show, one with the first of what we hope will be many of the major candidates for President of the United States,

this candidate, one with whose family I've had the pleasure of interacting professionally and socially, and one for whom personally I have a great deal of admiration, Robert Francis Kennedy Jr. Bobby, welcome to Judging Freedom. It's a pleasure to be with you. Thanks for having me, Judge. Bobby, tell us why you want to be President of the United States of America in these divisive and bitter days. I want my children to grow up with the same pride in their country that I grew up with. When I grew up, Judge, America, I believe America, and I think with a lot of good evidence, was the greatest nation in the history of the world. We were the exemplary nation. We had invented democracy, a modern democracy in 1776.

There are five countries that had imitated us by the Civil War by 1860. And when I was a little boy, all of the nations were becoming democracies based upon the American model. We had created this extraordinary middle class, which was an economic engine like nothing that humanity had ever seen. This was at the time, you know, in the 50 years after World War II, when we went through a period that economists call the Great Prosperity, the economic power of that American middle class had given America half the wealth on the face of

the earth. More importantly, we were a moral authority around the globe. People loved our country. They wanted our leadership. They knew the difference between leadership and bullying. And, you know, when I was a kid, my uncle was president and he refused to send Americans to war. He said when Ben Bradley, his best friend, one of his two best friends, asked him what he wanted on his gravestone, he said he kept the peace. He said the principal job of an American president is to keep the country out of war. And that was consistent with the warning that, you know, Dwight Eisenhower had made that if we made ourselves an imperium abroad, that we would not continue to be, that we would devolve into a surveillance state, a security state, a garrison state at home. That democracy at home was inconsistent with warmongering abroad. My uncle kept his word and stayed faithful to that aspiration. He refused to send, he never sent military combat troops to die in another country.

He refused to go into Laos at the beginning of his administration in 1961. He refused to go into Vietnam. He refused to go into Berlin in 62, refused to go into Cuba in 61, again in 63 during the Cuban Missile Crisis. He kept combat troops out of Vietnam. His advisors, his intelligence apparatus, wanted him to send 250,000 troops to Vietnam. They said that was necessary.

He said he finally caved in and sent 16,000 military advisors. They weren't allowed to participate in combat. And that's fewer men than he sent to get James Meredith into Ole Miss and Oxford, one black man. We all know the history. But if you become the president, and I would be ecstatic if you did, in January of 2025, you will inherit an America very, very much unlike the one over which your uncle was president and your father was the attorney general. The Republicans and Democrats hate each other. There is no such thing as the loyal opposition. They want to impeach each other and sanction each other and drive each other out of power. How can you, Robert Francis Kennedy Jr., bring about the type of amicable

working together that your father and uncle experienced in the early 60s? I think that's going to be one of the big challenges of my administration. But I think I'm already bridging that gap. And I think the way that you do that is pretty simple. It's by telling people the truth, by not spinning things, by not lying to people. I think there's so much hatred and anger and polarization in our society now. And it's driven by a lot of forces, including some like the social media that my uncle did not have to cope with. But the real dysfunction that has caused this is just the pervasive dishonesty of the federal government. When I was a kid, it was almost unimaginable that our government would lie to us. Americans just wouldn't believe that our government would ever lie to us.

In fact, the first time that Americans even considered that the government will lie to them was in May of 1961, when Gary Francis Harris, ours was shut down in the U2 over Russia. And Alan Dulles, the head of the CIA, convinced Eisenhower to lie to the public and to the world about it. And then, you know, when the Russians produced this pilot who was supposed to have committed suicide, Americans for the first time said, oh my gosh, our government lied to us. And it was shocking. When my uncle was president, 80% of the public believed the federal government. Today it's around 20%. And what that does, Judge, is it's like parents who are in a dysfunctional marriage who are lying to their kids all the time. And the kids start getting angry and fighting with each other and nobody knows what to believe.

And then you get, you know, and that's what's happening now with our society there. You know, because the trusted news sources, the federal government and the mainstream media, which used to never lie to the American people, now they are pathologically lying to us. Well, they not only lie, they kill. I mean, you have accused, and not without evidence, in fact, with substantial evidence, the CIA of having been involved in the murder of your uncle and your father. And instead of there being an uproar over that accusation, it was a bit of a ho-hum. We already knew that. So the public has come to accept a government that lies, cheats, steals, fights secret wars, and denies it, and kills

people. You have an enormous task of turning around that battleship almost on a dime. Yeah, but I'm confident that I can do that, Judge, because I know, you know, I've spent 40 years litigating against these agencies, and I understand the dynamics of agency capture. I understand the financial entanglements with the regulated industries that puts regulatory capture on steroids. And I also know the kind of reforms that you need to do to unravel agency capture at these agencies. And of course, the most captured agency is the CIA, which is now a functionary of the military industrial complex. Its role, as my uncle recognized when he was only

two months in office, and he got lured into by the CIA into this war with Cuba, which he refused to support. And he came out of the meeting when those men were dying on the beach of the Bay of Pigs. And he said, I want to take the CIA and shatter it into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds. But he spent three years thinking about how to reform the CIA.

In fact, he wanted to appoint my father, move my father from the Justice Department to run the CIA in order to reform it. My father refused to do that. And my father and grandfather just said that would be, you know, the optics of that, that the brother of the president was running this vast secret police network. It would look like, you know, Molotov and Stalin. What will you do? Let me just finish saying this.

Because of that experience, my father spent a lot of time thinking about how to fix the CIA. And in fact, he wrote it down. He outlined it a number of times, including a week before he died in a very extensive conversation he had with his friend, Pete Hamill. When Hamill asked him, what are you going to do about the CIA? And my father told him, you know, he said, we need to separate the espionage function of that agency, which is a legitimate function. That's the information gathering function, which we need an agency that's going to do it and do it well.

And analysis from the plans division, that's the clandestine division. And those two divisions, although they're kind of separate at the agency, physically they're separated by actually turnstiles where you can't get from one end of the agency, one side of the agency to the other. But what's happened is the clandestine services, the operations division, the black ops, the groups that fix elections and murder leaders and bribe and blackmail and, you know, and, and propagandize and, and do all those actions. It has become the tail that wags the espionage dog. And so there's no oversight of its, you know, of its actions. And as a result of that, there's never any accountability.

And that, you know, you're looking at what happened, what's happening in France today, you know, where you're having these terrible riots between Muslims and Muslim immigrant populations and the French police and the French government. And that ultimately, and that's happening now all over Europe, you know, we had Brexit, etc. But that ultimately is traceable to the Iraq war and the CIA's creation of ISIS, and then the subsequent invasion of Syria, which drove 2 million immigrants into Europe, and destabilized all the nations in Europe for the next several generations. And the CIA still has never had to account for this.

This is what happens when you try to overthrow Bashar Assad. It wasn't just an unsuccessful PSYOP. It was a catastrophe for the globe. Shortly before he died, President Truman wrote in the Washington Post that he deeply regretted what the CIA had become, that like you stated a few minutes ago, Bobby, he intended it to spy on our adversaries, but not to wage secret wars, not to kill people, and not to overthrow governments. Would you shut down, would you disband that part of the CIA? And we can broaden this question. I wouldn't disband it, but I would separate it. I will separate it from the espionage division, and I will have the espionage division overlooking the plants division. So,

you know, and I would use it a lot less aggressively. I don't think it works. I think if you actually analyze each of the actions that's happened over the past, you know, since 1947, since we created the agency, that you would see that the world is a much less safe place. It's a much less stable place. It's a much more, you know, it's a harder world because of the existence and the actions of the CIA. And I think anything, you know, I mean, you can kill a terrorist with a drone attack, but who's measuring the, you know, the impact of that, the long-term impact of dropping, making a drone strike on an Afghan village and making everybody else in that village now want to strap on it. So nobody ever looks at that. And that is the kind of thing that's made America much less safe. So they place my grandfather, Joseph Kennedy, uh, two years after, after, um, Truman wrote that editorial, my grandfather sat on a commission called the Hoover Commission. It was a presidential commission to look at the CIA.

And they recommended, and my grandfather concurred with the majority recommendation, that they disband the Plans Division of the CIA. So I think, you know, it's something that has to be looked at. But what we really need to do is make a rational judgment by looking at all of these actions they've taken and say, have any of these actually worked to make America a safer place to improve our national security? And let's do those kind, but let's not do the other kind. And I think what we're going to find is that most of them just don't.

Most of them, there's blowback that is worse than the problem that they tried to solve. Agreed. state, the secret police who monitor every keystroke on your mobile device and every keystroke on your desktop, who use the power of the government to get private entities like the social media giants to censor speech that they hate. I think you and I are on the same page here, but how would you stop that? I think you could stop the NSA spying on everybody with an executive order. They keep relying on executive order 13333, which was signed by Ronald Reagan, which is ambiguous, but they find language in there that lets them spy on everybody and every president since Reagan has refused to disturb that executive order. Would you stop the mass warrantless surveillance,

the suspicionless surveillance of every American? I absolutely would. And I can do that by executive order. And I think that that's critical. And as you know, we now have a judicial decision that came out from a federal judge this week, 155 page decision that orders the White House to stop collaborating with the social media sites and censoring Americans. You were part of that litigation, were you not? I was. And I was one of the first, I think the first people, I was the first person the White House began censoring.

The first order from the White House, which was on January 23rd, 2021, three days after President Biden came into office, the White House sent an order to Facebook to begin censoring me and to take me, you know, to take down my post or to Twitter. And three weeks later, as a result of that, as this judicial decision points out, Instagram removed me and they were not removing me for any kind of misinformation. In other words, there was nothing erroneous in what I was posting. They used a new term called malinformation to describe me. And the malinformation is information

that is accurate, but was harmful to official policies. And they weren't just censoring COVID policies. They weren't censoring any discussion of Hunter Biden's laptop. They ultimately were censoring any discussion of Hunter Biden's laptop. They ultimately were censoring and deplatforming people who posted things about the Ukraine war, about a whole long list, including criticism and satire about President Biden. That was one of the categories that were being censored. So, you know, Judge Doherty called this the largest, most concerted, most extreme example of censorship by United States government

in its history. And the government was threatening all the social media sites, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Wikipedia, and Google with removing the Section 230 shield. Section 230, as you know, is the section that says that if Facebook, for example, publishes somebody who makes a defamatory statement. In other words, if some customer of Facebook makes a defamatory statement against another person and then that is picked up and goes viral, can that person who is defamed sue Facebook? Well, no, they can't. And that's because of Section 230. Normally, if a publisher publishes defamation

about you that's written by somebody else, the publisher is liable. But with these social media sites, you can't sue them. And that is, as Mark Zuckerberg pointed out, that Section 30 protection is existential. Their business plan simply does not work without it. So the White House was telling, they were reluctant to censor Americans. And the White House was saying, if you don't do it, we are going to take away your Section 230. So they were, they were essentially, the White House was threatening

them with the destruction of their businesses if they refused to cooperate. So the First Amendment, which says Congress shall make no law bridging the freedom of speech, which, as we know today, applies to all the government. The government was doing indirectly what the Constitution prohibits it from doing directly. It was using private entities to suppress your speech and the speech of millions of others. And thanks to the litigation and a courageous federal judge, they got caught. Yeah, they got caught. And they, and you know, it's a really, I think the decision is bulletproof. It's 155 page decision. The Biden administration says that, that they're going to appeal that decision, but I think

they're not going to get very far in the Fifth Circuit, and then they'll go up to the Supreme Court. And my guess is, and I think you'd probably agree with me, that this Supreme Court is not, you know, what this judge outlined, you know, the level of, you know, of political censorship. I don't see how you could get a more perfect picture of what you're not supposed to do on the First Amendment. The First Amendment does not prohibit Facebook from taking me down if they don't like what they say or if they just don't like the way I look. Zuckerberg, he's a private publisher. What the First Amendment does prohibit is the government

telling him to take it down and then him doing that. Precisely. Let me go to a few other topics. Right now, rotting in a windowless dungeon in London is Julian Assange, who many people believe is a hero and a patriot for exposing the war crimes of the George W. Bush administration. Hiding somewhere in Moscow is Edward Snowden for exposing the mass warrantless surveillance conducted by the Bush and Obama administrations. Sitting in a jail not far from where you are now is Jack Teixeira, who revealed documents, the accuracy and authenticity of which the government has never challenged, which show that the government itself believes Ukraine is about to lose the war and is lying to Americans about it. What is your review on prosecuting these folks whom the government says has committed espionage, but many of us believe have engaged in the most courageous

transparency since Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers case in the early 1970s. Yeah, I mean, I'll pardon Julian Assange on day one. And I think his situation is the most egregious because he's just a publisher. You know, he published things that I don't see why the New York Times and the Washington Post are not at the barricades at the White House saying, let this guy go, because their publishers could just as easily be blocked. In fact, they then published what he had published, what he's in jail for publishing. Correct. They republished it. Correct.

They republished it. So it's crazy. And then with Snowden, I know the most about his case. And, you know, he's clearly an American hero. The information that he released that we're all being, you know, surveilled, that as you say, every keystroke is being recorded by the NSA. Nobody knew that. You know, that was shocking to us. And Congress went and passed laws in reaction to it to protect Americans from, you know, the highest level of surveillance. Those laws, you know, turned out kind of anemic. But, you know, the fact that Congress reacted to, felt it was necessary to, once they knew

his information, to react to protect americans and what the nsa is doing is testimony that what he did was for the benefit of the american people he wasn't he's not a spy who was trying to you know hurt our country and or you know some other country in advance it's a you know it's a total misjustice that that he in prison. What about Jack Teixeira, the young National Guardsman from Cape Cod? Yeah, you know what? I don't know enough about his case to tell you that I'm for sure I'm going to pardon him. I need to look at that. I need to get lawyers to look at it.

I know the other case well enough that I can tell you right that. I need to get lawyers to look at it. I know the other case well enough that I can tell you right now what I'm going to do. His case, I'm inclined, you know, I'm inclined to, my inclination is to pardon him. Of course, I believe everything that he showed us at the federal government is lying to us about everything to do with Ukraine. And, you know, this has been a, you know, this whole, this was a, this was a sell job that they gave us on the Ukraine. You know, they got two more, two more topics, both foreign affairs. And the first is Ukraine. What would you do on day one? I mean, Joe Biden has no goal, no exit ramp, and is in by about $70 billion already. And we believe there are American troops on the ground

out of uniform, which lets him lie about it. What would President Kennedy do about that? I would settle that war. I would negotiate a peace immediately. I mean, the Russians have tried and tried again to settle the war, to avoid it. You know, they wanted to sign the Minsk Accords, which was a very, very reasonable document that we keep NATO out of the Ukraine, the Ukraine remain neutral, that we remove the Aegis missile systems from Romania and Poland, and that the wholesale killing of ethnic Russians in the Donbass by the Ukrainian government that America put in power should stop. So those are all things we should have agreed to. And in fact, Zelensky won in 2019 by promising to sign the Minsk Accords. Wow. Does America have any dog in this fight? Is there even the remotest threat to American national security in this border dispute between Russia and Ukraine?

No. And it's existential for the Russians. The Russians have been invaded three times through the Ukraine. The last time, one out of every seven Russians died. Hitler destroyed that country. When my uncle described what Hitler had done to Russia through the Ukraine, he asked Americans to imagine what if all the cities from the east coast of Chicago were reduced to rubble and all the forests burned and all the fields burned. That's what happened to Russia. And they don't want it to happen again. They got a legitimate national security interest. But they also settled the war again in April of 2022 and signed an agreement with Zelensky and Putin. And the Russians were withdrawing.

And then we sent Boris Johnson over there to blow up that agreement because we wanted the war. We wanted the war for the reasons that Biden has said. It's a real the real reason for the war is regime change in Russia. Lloyd Austin, his secretary of defense, said that our purpose in being in the Ukraine is to degrade, to exhaust the Russian army and degrade its capacity to fight elsewhere in the world. That is not something that is good for the Ukraine. And then Mitch McConnell was most frank about it. He said, don't worry about sending $113 billion over to the Ukraine because it's all coming back to U.S. military contractors, and we're creating jobs here in America. And it's a perfect war because the people who are getting killed are Ukrainian kids, 135,000 Ukrainian kids. My son fought over there side by side with those boys.

Last subject matter, Bobby. China, friend or foe? China is our adversary. It's our competitor. But China does not want a war with America. China wants to compete with us economically. China does not, you know, project military power unless we make them, unless we, you know, now, because we're putting bases in the South China Sea and putting ships in the South China Sea and flexing our muzzles and rattling the sabers about Taiwan. They're going to come over and do the same thing in Cuba, just like the Russians did to us in 1962 with the missile crisis. When we put missiles right next to their border, they said, we're going to do it to you. China doesn't want that. We spent three times in our military what China does. China has one and a half bases around the world. That's it. We have 800. China wants to compete with us, and they want to dominate us, but they want to do it economically.

And I'm not frightened about battling China on the economic playing field. I think that's good for our country. It's good for China and it's good for the rest of the world. And I think we ought to welcome that competition. I don't think we should try to fight them militarily. I think that's disastrous for our country and it's not helping our national security. World War III is not going to be good for American safety. Robbie Kennedy, what a delight to spend this time with you. Thank you.