Judging Freedom - Justice Gorsuch-Greatest Intrusion on Americans_ Ukraine Aid Over Estimated_

Episode Date: May 19, 2023

See omny.fm/listener for privacy information.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Friday, May 19th, 2023. It's about 2.35 in the afternoon here on the east coast of the United States. Here are your hot topics for today. And they do run the gamut. I'm going to give you a little teaser. The last of these five topics that I'm going to do, when I first saw it, put goosebumps on my arms. It is a dissent by Justice Neil Gorsuch in a very, very technical matter. I'm not even going to explain the tortured procedural history which brought the Supreme Court to the point where he issued this dissent. But as I read portions of it to you, it'll put goosebumps on your arms as well. It is one of the more beautiful and powerful statements made by a

Supreme Court justice in the modern era, harshly criticizing what mayors and governors and even the federal government did to us during the COVID lockdowns. But first, this should come as no surprise to you. The White House announced just yesterday that the Pentagon has overestimated the aid it gave to, the military aid it gave to Ukraine by $3 billion, with a B dollars. I don't know if you saw the interview I just did with Lieutenant Colonel Tony Shaver, who's not surprised about it at all and says it happens all the time. So the question is, should we believe the Pentagon statement that they were evaluating equipment which was used as if it were new. And so let's say a jet fighter new is worth $100 million, but used is worth 50. They were

billing this thing as 100, even though they only gave Ukraine something worth 50. Therefore, in their minds, they have another 50 million to give away. The government says, the Pentagon says, two Pentagon officials testified under oath to the Congress that this is what happened. And so the blank check that Congress gave to President Biden, add another $3 billion to that checking account. Boy, I am scratching my head over this one. Who knows who to believe? How can the people that spend our money supposedly in an effort to keep us safe, in reality, in an effort to enrich the friends that they're going to soon work for after they leave the Pentagon, that famous revolving door. The Secretary of Defense himself went from being a four-star general to making a fortune on the

board of Raytheon to being the Secretary of Defense. Gee, I wonder what he'll do when Joe Biden is no longer president or when he's had enough of his $225,000 a year salary as the Secretary of Defense and decides he wants to make $200,000 per board meeting, which is just about what he'll get for going back to Raytheon. Nothing wrong with people making money, but it's reprehensible when they do favors for their friends when they're in the government so they can get these jobs after they leave the government. Is that what we are confronting with Ukraine? You bet it is. So when the director of the CIA

speaks to President Zelensky and says, here's a list of the 35 biggest grafters, grifters in your government, military and political, and by the way, Mr. President, you're at the top of the list. And if you add it up, this is all according to Cy Hirsch, the government denies this. Cy has never, ever been proven wrong in any of these major exposés he's written, going back to the My Lai massacre, comes to $400 million when you add it up. President Zelensky says, okay, we'll stop the corruption. Who knows if it's stopped? Don't you care about $400 million disappeared? Don't you care about $3 billion unaccounted for? Pentagon famously has looked for $200 billion in the past 10 years that it says it can't find. Going back 10 years, going back to the beginning of the

middle of the presidency of Barack Obama, not President Obama's personal fault, but certainly the fault of a culture in the Defense Department. We can't stand for this, my dear friends, that this kind of money can be wasted and this kind of arithmetic error can occur. It's your money, or to be more precise, it's money borrowed in your name, which your children and your grandchildren and your great-grandchildren and generations as yet unborn and uneven thought of will be paying back, will be paying the interest on the loans. The G7, that's the seven biggest industrialized nations in Europe, plus the United States and Canada, are meeting

at the site of one of the greatest mass murders in history, Hiroshima, Japan. That's where Harry Truman dropped an atomic bomb aimed at a Roman Catholic cathedral during mass on a Sunday morning and dropped the atomic bomb basically to show Joe Stalin that we had more powerful bombs than the Russians did so you better watch out. Dropped the atomic bomb at a time when he knew that Japan was in weeks of surrendering, killed tens and tens of thousands of innocents, destroyed billions in land, and harmed the lives and the lungs and the eyes of hundreds of thousands more. Okay, it's the wrong place to be doing this. They claim it's the right place because they want to talk about peace. They want to talk about peace. They're talking about war. They invited President Zelensky to join them. Ukraine, of course, is not in the G7. What is President Zelensky going to do there? Pray for more armaments. Ask for F-16s. We'll get to F-16s in a minute. What else is the G7 going to do? It's going to impose more sanctions on Russia. Have the sanctions hurt Russia? They have not. Have the sanctions hurt Western Europe and the United States? They have. Western Europe is suffering worse inflation than we have. Western Europe's fuel supplies, cheap fuel from Russia, cheap manufactured goods from China,

cheap raw materials from Russia, cut off or diminished radically because of Joe Biden's insane sanction scheme. In the United States, the sanctions don't even come from the Congress. One of the things when I read Justice Gorsuch's dissent about the lockdowns that he rants and raves about, and rightly so, is that these are rules issued by chief executives. Most of the lockdowns for COVID were issued by governors and mayors and a few by President Trump and a few by President Biden. None were enacted into law. The legislatures were afraid to sit and write the rules. Same thing with sanctions. The Congress has given Joe Biden a blank check. You want to make it a crime to deal with a Russian bank? You want to

make it a crime for an oligarch to operate a 165-foot-long yacht, which he has legally paid for, in Western waters? Where's the legislation that makes that a crime? Answer, nowhere. The sanctions are imposed by executive fiat. I know of a Russian billionaire who purchased an apartment in a beautiful apartment building where that bears Donald Trump's name on it in New York City. He's now penniless because Joe Biden seized the apartment and seized his assets. He had no more to do with the war than any of you listening to me has. This is the profound injustice of these sanctions. This is government theft of property without due process,

and it isn't even done by the legislative branch. It's done by executive fiat. F-16s are on their way to Ukraine. Where are they coming from? Okay. Just as Joe Biden is engaged in a lot of deception about whether or not we have boots on the ground in Ukraine, because we do, but they're out of uniform, which allows him to say no boots on the ground, since boots on the ground is a colloquial phrase that means men and women with arms ready to fight. These are men. I don't know if they have arms. I don't know if they're ready to fight. These are men. I don't know if they have arms. I don't know if they're ready to fight. They're probably literally wearing boots, but they are not wearing military battle garb. They're probably dressed in civilian garb, and we know that they are there. It's a subterfuge.

Here's Joe Biden's latest subterfuge. F-16s, fighter jets. Tony Schaefer says they're not the best there is, but they're better than anything Ukraine has. They're not as good as what Russia has, but it might give the Ukrainians a fighting chance. F-16s manufactured in the U.S., sold by American manufacturers to Western countries, sold with a caveat. The caveat is you can't give these away without the approval of the United States. Let me get this straight. Private industry manufactures these things. The government licenses private industry to sell them to a Western European country. The government enters the sales process, even though there's not a government nickel involved, and says your sale papers have to say that the recipient, let's say West Germany or France or Great Britain, cannot give these away to another country without the

consent of whoever is the president of the United States at the time. These F-16s were all sold when Barack Obama and Donald Trump were in the White House. Now Joe Biden is there. Now these countries want American permission to give these F-16s to Ukraine. Last night, Joe Biden said, well, in Japan at Hiroshima, Joe Biden said, thinking of the horrors that Harry Truman visited upon the dead in Hiroshima. Joe Biden said, thinking of the horrors that Harry Truman visited upon the dead in Hiroshima, let's visit some horrors upon dead in Ukraine. Let's give them the F-16s. So now Germany, France, Great Britain, and Italy are free to give away American-made, American-sold, German, French, British, Italian purchased with their tax dollars, F-16s, to President Zelensky. He'll be quite happy about that. Of course,

there's no one in the Ukraine military. There is no Air Force. I may have referred to the Ukrainian Air Force earlier today. I was wrong, and I correct myself and apologize for the error. There is no Ukrainian Air Force. Well, how the hell are they going to fly the F-16? Okay, America, at American expense, is going to train Ukrainian military. I guess some of them have an aptitude for flying. There are some old Soviet MiGs. That's Cold War era junk that the Ukrainian army may have had pilots that flew, but obviously it's not as sophisticated air force as we have, as China has, as Russia has. Okay. So these young men and women will come from the Ukraine to the United States. It will take a year, a year for them to learn how to fight and how to fly an F-16. If they have already flown Russian MiGs, it will take them a year and a half to learn how

to fly American made F-16s. Why the additional time if you're already a pilot? Because you have to unlearn. You have to unlearn the instinct, the muscle memory. I'm going like this because when you learn to shoot, you have muscle memory in your hand so you can react instinctually without even taking the time to aim. Same for a pilot. Pilots are trained with muscle memory so that their arms, their hands, their legs, their feet, their eyes, their noses, their ears, their head will move immediately and instinctually in an emergency to do the right thing. The Ukrainian pilots have to unlearn this. Then they have to learn new muscle memory for the F-16s. How much will it cost? I don't know if you heard the number from Tony Schaefer when I asked him this question about an hour ago. 10 million bucks. 10 million dollars. The F-16s are worth about 100 million each. $10 million, American taxpayer dollars, to train a Ukrainian person, former pilot or just

military, to fly an F-16. Will that $10 million even come out of the $113 billion checkbook that Congress has given to President Biden, or will it come out of the Air Force's expenditures? Who knows? It's going to cost a fortune. It's going to result in disaster. It's going to be, if you want Ukraine to win, if you think Russia can be defeated, if you think the United States has an exit ramp, if you think the United States has a mission, if you think there's a way of achieving the mission, the F-16s will be too little too late because they're going to be sitting on the ground for a year. Even if they arrived from Wiesbaden, Germany tomorrow, they're going to sit on the ground for a year unless

unless old Joe really loses it and sends American pilots to fly these. And when that first American pilot comes home in a body bag, then the American public will rise up and say enough is enough. It's one thing, Joe, for you to fight an undeclared war. It's one thing, Joe. I don't mean to disrespect him by calling him Joe. Okay. It's one thing. It's another thing, Mr. President, for you to be wasting our money. It's another thing, Mr. President, for you to be killing Russians. It is an intolerable thing, Mr. President, for you to

allow American boys and girls to die in this war that for American national security is useless. Where the heck is the Congress? Doesn't Congress see the mission creep? Doesn't Congress see that the more complex the equipment we give them or allow them to get from our allies because we permitted American industry to sell to the allies, the more complex the equipment is, the more Americans will be involved in training and, God forbid, using that equipment. We already know that the boots on the ground, we know this from Colonel McGregor, the boots on the ground in Ukraine are aiming American equipment at Russian boys, and the boots on the ground in Poland are pulling the triggers. Question, are American boys using American

equipment to shoot American ammunition at Russian boys? Answer, yes. Question, has the Congress allowed the government to do this? Answer, no. Question, has the Congress declared war on Russia? Answer, no. Question, does President Biden want war with Russia? What do you think? I think he does. Last night, the Biden administration, actually last night they admitted this. About a week ago, the Biden administration boasted that we used a drone to kill an Al Qaeda leader. Just like they did about eight or nine months ago. Just like Donald Trump did with General Soleimani. Trump's my friend, but I condemned that murder. General Soleimani was on his way to talk about crafting a big picture peace between Arabs and Israelis and Iranians,

who as you know are not Arab, in the Middle East. General Soleimani was Iranian. He was the head of the Iranian military. He was meeting with his counterpart in Iraq for lunch. On the way to lunch, Trump's people destroyed him, evaporated him with a drone. Six months ago, an al-Qaeda leader was evaporated with a drone by Biden's people. Two weeks ago, the Pentagon boasted, ah, we just got another one. We just evaporated another al-Qaeda leader with a drone. Good for us. Except it was a bricklayer, the father of 10 children. They killed the wrong guy. Where did this happen? Where did they kill this person? Where did this occur? A flashpoint at which United States national security is a danger? Syria. Has the Congress

declared war on Syria? No. Has the Congress authorized the president, any president, Obama did it, Bush did it, Trump did it, Now Biden's doing it. To fight a war in Syria? Absolutely not. Is the United States suffering from any national security breach because of what's going on in Syria? Of course not. There's been a civil war for 15 years. The Russians are on one side. So therefore, automatically, we have to be on the other side. So Joe Biden's geniuses, either in the Pentagon or the CIA, I think this one was the Pentagon, decide to kill an al-Qaeda leader. Instead, they find a bricklayer, the father of 10, and he's evaporated. What will happen? What will be the recourse for this act of homicide,

this act of murder, authorized by President Biden and perpetrated by whoever he told to do it. You're not going to find out the names. I mean, it'll take another Julian Assange to expose who really did this. Some faceless, nameless bureaucrat, probably in a room in Langley, Virginia, sees what he thinks is the Al Qaeda leader in the crosshairs and presses a button, and the drone goes off in the wrong direction or the crosshairs and presses a button and the drone goes off in the wrong direction or the crosshairs was on the wrong person and the bricklayer who's the father of 10 is evaporated. Is this the government you voted for? Well, this is the government you got. Justice Neil Gorsuch, who I admire and love, who I argued for President Trump on numerous occasions, should be appointed to replace Justice Scalia in the Supreme Court of the United States, has written an absolutely brilliant, utterly blistering dissent on a very, very technical issue before the Supreme Court. The technical

aspect, the procedural aspect of the issue is not relevant. What's relevant is what he said. I'm sorry you're going to be looking at the top of my head, but I have to read this word for word. And even though I'm pretty good at memorizing things, I don't have a teleprompter here and it's a little too long to memorize. Justice Neil Gorsuch, Supreme Court of the United States, May 18, 2023, yesterday. Since March 2020, we may have experienced the greatest intrusions on civil liberties in the peacetime history of this country. Executive officials across the country issued emergency decrees on a breathtaking scale. Governors and local leaders imposed lockdown orders forcing people to remain in their homes. They shuttered businesses and schools, public and private. They closed churches even as they allowed casinos and other favored businesses to carry on.

They threatened violators, not just with civil penalties, but with criminal sanctions as well. They surveilled church parking lots, recorded license plates, and issued orders warning that attendance even at outdoor religious services, satisfying all state social distancing and hygiene requirements, could amount to criminal conduct. Fear and the desire for safety are powerful forces. They can lead to a clamor for action, almost any action, as long as someone does something to address a perceived threat. A leader or an expert who claims he can fix everything, even if we only do exactly as he says, can prove to be an irresistible force. We do not need to confront a bayonet. We only need a nudge before we willingly abandon the nicety of requiring laws to be adopted by our legislative representatives and accept instead rule by decree.

This is no new story, even as the ancients warned that democracies can degenerate toward autocracy in the face of fear. More as we get it, Judge Napolitano for judging freedom.