Judging Freedom - Lt. Col: Karen Kwiatkowski: Who’s Running the US Government?

Episode Date: July 2, 2024

Lt. Col: Karen Kwiatkowski: Who’s Running the US Government?See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Thank you. Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Tuesday, July 2nd, 2024. Lieutenant Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski will be with us in just a moment on who's really running the executive branch of the United States government. But first this. You all know that I am a paid spokesperson for Lear Capital, but I'm also a customer, a very satisfied customer. About a year ago, I bought gold and it's now increased in value 23%. So $100 invested in gold a year ago is now worth $123.

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Tell them the judge sent you. Karen, welcome here, my dear friend. You and I have both argued on this show and elsewhere that the United States is no longer a republic, it's an empire. Is it a failing empire? Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. You know, an empire, and empires arise because they profit from being an empire. They gain all kinds of benefits from their imperial practices and from expanding and taking over raw materials, culture, all kinds of things benefit empires. And this is why they grow. We're long past that. The United States empire is broke, completely broke, and it's not benefiting from any of the traditional benefits that you would find in an empire. So yeah, we're definitely

failing. And we can't even defend the core homeland, if you want to call it that. We can't even defend that, much less what was left of our imperial ambitions. The empire aspect, you could just look at a couple of numbers, $886 billion in the annual defense budget, more than the next nine countries combined, a thousand military installations at which U.S. troops are present around the world, either owned or leased by the U.S. Oh, and Pepe Escobar just informed us, and Ritter confirms, add another 15 to that thousand in Finland, along the Finnish-Russian border. How crazy is that? Nearly all of this is militaristic, is it not?

You're not talking about the British Empire where they took over land and they depleted the natural resources from the land. You're talking about an empire where they paved square miles of cement to hold troops and weapons and jet planes. Am I right? Yeah, I mean, clearly that's where this empire, the United States empire, has invested. And that's why we spend 10 times more than any other country that's even close to us. You add up all these countries and our budget for military stuff is much higher. And it has been. It has been for decades. I mean, this is not a new statistic in terms of how much we spend on the military. And again, that military, we call it defense, like the Department of

Defense. But that military doesn't defend anything. It certainly doesn't defend the United States. We're not set up to do that. And it also doesn't intimidate our enemies abroad. So it's really just pouring money into, obviously, defense industrial complex. You know, there's some beneficiaries to the spending, but it's not the American people at all. They're the last ones we think of. I always thought back since my days in high school that when the Pentagon was built and they changed the name of the Defense Department from the Department of War to the Department of Defense, that the Department of War was actually a more accurate description of what they do. What the hell are they defending? When is the last time

the United States of America was actually defended? 1776? Yeah, or maybe 1812 or whatever. I mean, a little bit. I'm not sure. Depending upon which version you believe, the War of 1812, either the Brits tried to take us back or we tried to take Canada. I'm not sure which it is. That's the last time that the country ever actually had to be defended. Yeah. Who really runs the federal government? Well, this is a question I think everybody on the planet who pays attention to the United States and watches the United States is wondering who is running it, because it's clearly not the president. It might be the president's wife. We're not sure. But she's not qualified and she's not elected. So I don't know how she got that job. The institutions that run the bureaucracies,

you know, the executive institutions like the Department of Defense, Homeland Security, Department of Agriculture, all the many departments, they really don't need a leader. And they don't want anybody to change what they're doing, which we saw under Trump. You know, many of these departments pushed back against changes that Trump was proposing, even if he didn't propose them, if he even talked about them, they said, oh, no, we're not doing that. We're not doing that. So they don't really, they kind of run on autopilot, bureaucratic growth, whatever the bureaucratic objectives are, and they don't need a leader. But someone has to make decisions in terms, particularly when we see many wars that

we are involved in around the world. Okay. We need an adult in the room. We need somebody who is thinking about what is good for our country because these bureaucracies, the Department of Defense, they don't think about what is good for the country. They think about what is good for the Department of Defense. So that's kind of why the people through the Electoral College get to choose a president. There's supposed to be some connection between the people and the president. So the president can say what's good for American people. But this president, the one we currently have, I mean, Joe Biden, you know, he is not even awake. I mean, he doesn't, it's not clear what he's

processing, what he thinks, what decade his mind is living in. We don't know any of this. And so it is an uncertain time. You know, the institutions will continue to do what they do, but none of what those executive institutions do put the American people and their safety first. None of them do. Only the president, maybe the Congress. That's it. Here's Joe Biden. I think this was after the debate about money we give to Ukraine makes us strong.

Number six. All that money we give Ukraine and from weapons we make here in the United States, we give them the weapons, not the money at this point. And our NATO allies have produced as much funding for Ukraine as we have. That's why we're strong. Of course, it was at the debate, and that is farcical. And the guy next to him, of course, was principally responsible for the last tranche of money and weapons, that $180 billion one where a chunk went to Ukraine and a chunk went to Israel and a chunk went to Taiwan. The Republicans would have had enough votes in the House to defeat it, but then the former president was persuaded to go

along with it. On core issues like spying on the American public without warrants, wars that are not defensive, borrowing trillions to fund the federal government, much of which was never authorized by the Constitution. Put aside their personalities and their mental acuities. Isn't it Tweedledee and Tweedledum? It really is, sadly. Sadly, it is. Because I would really love to be able to say we have a really good choice here. It's a two-party system. We have two parties, and one of them's clearly better than the other one. And in terms of candidates, I mean, Trump has value as a candidate that's good for the people. One is he connects with people. And two is he's really, like he continues to say, he's not really owned by these institutions in

Washington. So there's an advantage there. Well, he might be owned by Mrs. Adelson, who just gave $100 million to one of his PACs in return for God knows what kind of a promise in Israel. That's true. He's going to owe the people that donate to him. And also, he's fundamentally not educated in things like constitutional intent. He also doesn't really understand very well free market trade. His solution to almost everything is let's put up a trade barrier. Well, that's just like Biden, except more articulate. So it's not good. It's not a good set of choices. And the other thing is the two parties are useless because the Republican Party is overwhelmingly just about as bad as the Democratic Party

on issues of trade, on issues of taxation, on issues of government spending. You know, how many times have we had a majority Republicans in the Congress and they said, oh yeah, we're going to move towards balancing the budget in the next 10 or 15 years. And they said, oh, yeah, we're going to move towards balancing the budget in the next 10 or 15 years. And they did nothing. They did nothing. OK, so we don't really have any choices that are going to get us out of this. And really, empires have to fail. They have to fail and they have to collapse. There's no correcting an empire. If we had a republic, there's some correction that you could do in a republic. But we have a $335 million population. It is an empire.

It's not a republic. It can't be a republic at that size. It can't be corrected. You know, I really never agreed, even though we were personal friends from all the times he was at Fox, with John McCain on anything. But he did make a point about the corrupting influence of money in politics. I mean, look at what APAC and the donor class can do to the Congress. The Congress doesn't represent us. This isn't a representative democracy or republic. The Congress represents the people that donate to them because they know that with

those donations, their chances of keeping their jobs are a lot stronger. And without donations, their chances of losing their jobs are a lot stronger. And it almost doesn't matter which party you're in. Was there even a debate, a serious debate on money to Ukraine and money to Israel? There was. I didn't hear it. No, no, there's no debate. The fundamental thing that the Congress thinks about is if we vote these things, will people, will APEC love us? Will Ukraine get off our backs? And how much of this can we say goes back into our district?

This is all they care about. So this is, it's really a warped system. It's not a republic. It doesn't operate as a republic. And, you know, Thomas Massey had a great interview with Tucker the other day, and he talked about how APAC, every congressman has an APAC handler, basically. And he said the handler actually is someone from that congressman's district. But those donations from large organizations, in particular APAC, it's not just the amount of money that might be given to this congressman or that congressman. APAC operates congressional removals. You know, they run primaries. They run attack ads at the national level if they have to really eliminate people who oppose them. And no citizen and no small regional group of citizens

can match that. We can't compete. The average person cannot compete with APEC. Right. We just had a congressional race not far from where I live, on the other side of northeast New Jersey in Westchester County in the Bronx, Congressman Jamel Bowman. Now, he's a hard lefty, but a fierce opponent of aid to Israel. AIPAC spent over $22 million in a Democratic primary in a congressional race in New York City. So we're not talking about a congressional district in Texas that's 100 miles long. We're talking about a very, very tight and compact, though expensive media market, New York City.

AIPAC spent between $20 and $22 million, and they soundly defeated Congressman Bowman. And of course, the newspapers the next day said this is a lesson to anybody else that would defy them. Are you concerned that the Russians recognize that without United States technology, equipment, ammunition, and personal involvement by downloading top secret codes, there would have been no attack on their Sevastopol beach on a Sunday afternoon? Stated differently, the United States attacked Russia? Yeah, well, the Russians believe that and they have evidence to that effect. And some of it's been, I think, provided in the media in terms of how we operate the airspace in that region over Ukraine and over that part of the Black Sea. So,

you know, yes. Now, if you had a president who was cognizant of what his major near peer competitor believes and thinks, and these were nuclear powers, then you could consult with him and you could say, Mr. Biden, is it true that this is what's happening? And what does this mean? But you can't even I mean, Biden is unaware of this. You know, what I would say probably, you know, hundreds of thousands of people in the United States recognize that the United States is running, targeting, we're running the intelligence. We are arming, not just arming Ukraine, but helping them pick targets. And of course, we lie about some of it. We say, oh, it's all Ukraine's decision. We say this. So many, many people know this. But you know, our president, I mean, Joe Biden, he doesn't know any of this. So many, many people know this, but you know, our president, I mean, Joe Biden, he doesn't know any of this. He is not aware. And even if they brief him, I don't think it stays in his frontal cortex very long. He just is not functional. So in that respect, I think it's

very dangerous to have an incompetent, not just a morally or politically incompetent president, which he is, but an actually intellectually incompetent, a guy who's senile. Because the Russians, what choice, how can they communicate? How can the Russians communicate with the United States? Right. Well, Tony Blinken refuses to talk to Sergei Lavrov. I will give Lloyd Austin credit, just a little bit of credit, a credit for calling his opposite number in Russia after the bombing of the beach. And the Russians basically said, stop, don't fly anything over the Black Sea,

whether it's a drone or a man, because we're going to shoot it down. Now There's Blinken, who looks like a youngster, and there's the senior foreign policy diplomat in the world and the most respected, whose English is as good as Tony Blinken's, and I'm not critical of Blinken's English, in Sergei Lavrov. Who do you think authorized that killing on the beach? Can we blame Biden because he authorized the use of American military equipment to strike inside Russia? He signed that. I'm going to assume he read it and understood it. But in your opinion, you were in the Air Force, in your opinion, would a decision like that to hit the beach or to hit a military target near the beach with the risk that if they shot it down, it would hit the beach? Yeah. Well, with that kind of a decision, how far up the food chain would it have gone? Would it have gone to Lloyd Austin? Would it have gone to the White House? Yeah,

I don't think it would go to the White House. And it's very possible that it doesn't go all the way to Lloyd Austin either. Because if you think about who the folks are that run our wars overseas, that run our airspace control, that run our drones, that target. And of course, this is a bunch of guys, enlisted guys, you know, in Nevada who target. And think about all the things we targeted over the last 25 years in Iraq, in, you know, in Syria, in Afghanistan, all the wedding parties we blew up, you know, all the things that they're so upset that Julian Assange and WikiLeaks had released information about. Right.

So these are the people in our military, okay? These are the people who remained in our military. Guys who did stuff like this when they were lieutenants and captains are now colonels and generals. So think about how normal that that is, how normal that process is, how inhuman that process of remote targeting has become. So yeah, I don't think Austin even would be consulted on something like that. They would simply say, we are targeting X amount of places in Crimea. There's little concern if it's a holiday and if there's beaches nearby and what will happen if the Russians respond. Because we have targeted civilians with impunity for well over two decades and probably longer, but I'm familiar with it from the last 25 years.

So I think this is something the machine does. This is something the institution itself does. And there's nobody to stop it. It's not that someone has to consent to it. There's no one to stop it. And Lloyd Austin didn't stop it. Here is the last statement Biden has made in public. It was at the debate concerning Vladimir Putin. I want you to comment on it. Cut number eight, Chris. The fact is that Putin is a war criminal. He's killed thousands and thousands of people.

And he has made one thing clear. He wants to reestablish what was part of the Soviet empire, not just a peace. He wants all of Ukraine. That's what he wants. And then you think he'll stop there? Do you think he'll stop if he takes Ukraine? What do you think happens to Poland?

What do you think of Belarus? What do you think happens to Poland? What do you think of Belarus? What do you think happens to those NATO countries? There is no evidence of which I'm aware, Karen, to support any of that. No, and not only that, there's much evidence to the contrary, not just coming directly from Putin's mouth, and not just one time from Putin's mouth, but over many, many years of what he has indicated his concerns are and his intentions. OK, so first off, Putin has never said that. And he's never, you know, he's repeatedly said the opposite. and the prime ministers and presidents in these EU countries and NATO countries, they aren't building their defenses for the Russians to make a mad dash, you know, to

reestablish some Soviet Union. They're not preparing for that because they know that's not what it is. So his European people aren't telling him that. Putin is not telling him that. The media might be telling him that in the United States. The intel community cannot possibly be telling him that. But then I wonder, maybe his wife's telling him that. Maybe his friends in the media are telling him that. Maybe Hunter is advising him. Because, you know, we know that's who he huddled with after this disastrous debate. I don't know if you call it a debate, but this event last Thursday, you know, he huddled with family members, not with key people that have some objective knowledge. So, you know, I don't know what he's smoking, but again, in Biden's case, he clearly has something, he has mental problems. So he's not really able to process. Someone may have told him this three years ago and it pops up and that's what he believes. And it can't be corrected by other information. This is just a processing problem. He that particular egregious lie about Putin, probably because they've been, you know, helping publish it.

But I think anybody that has any sense and certainly, certainly the rest of the world, including NATO, including Europe, understand that what he just said there is a complete fabrication. It is not true, and they know it's not true. Are you worried about Russian retaliation against the United States, or do you take solace in Putin being the adult in the room, who's deliberate, patient, slow, and not, contrary to what Joe Biden says, not interested in war. Yeah, well, we're lucky that Putin is this way. I don't know if that will be enough. You know, he just, Russia just- He does have a lot of hotheads around him. Yeah, and also, this war is touching Russia personally. You know, Washington isn't getting shot at, but Russian

territory and Russian cities are being attacked routinely. So this war is real to the Russians, and they're actually a little, I think, more enthusiastic about doing something drastic than maybe Putin is. And he's certainly, like you said, very measured. Yeah, we're lucky that Putin's in charge. I will say they just destroyed a bunch of Sukhoi aircraft that were in Ukrainian bases deep in Ukraine. Most of them were under repair, but they're not going to get repaired now. If those F-16s, American F-16s and our NATO F-16s start showing up in Ukraine, they will be destroyed just like that. So I think Putin is very, he's very demonstrative. He's like, this is what I said, and here I'm going to show you. Okay. And he's treating us like we're little children that

have to be educated, and maybe we are. Karen Kwiatkowski, a pleasure, my dear friend. Thank you very much. A happy Independence Day. We may be independent of the British, but we're not independent of our own government. But we'll have a nice four-day weekend, nevertheless. All the best to you, my friend. Absolutely.

Back at you, Judge. Thank you. Thank you. See you next week. Tomorrow, we have a full and exciting day for you. At eight in the morning, Dr. Gilbert Doctorow. At 11 in the morning, Professor John Mearsheimer. At 12 noon Eastern, former Congressman Dennis Kucinich, a fierce anti-war patriot who will talk about why is the Congress always in favor of war. At two o'clock, Colonel Douglas McGregor. At three o'clock,

Phil Giraldi. At four o'clock, Colonel Larry Wilkerson. And never to be outdone, but always at the end of the day, at five o'clock, the inimitable Max Blumenthal. The day before the 4th of July. Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom. Thank you.