Judging Freedom - Max Blumenthal : Can the Pentagon Count its Missiles?

Episode Date: August 13, 2026

Max Blumenthal : Can the Pentagon Count its Missiles?See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Undeclared wars are commonplace. Pragically, our government engages in preemptive war, otherwise known as aggression with no complaints from the American people. Sadly, we have become accustomed to living with the illegitimate use of force by government. To develop a truly free society, the issue of initiating force must be understood and rejected. What if sometimes to love your country you 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? Hey, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for judging freedom. Today is Thursday, August 13th, 2006, Max Blumenthal joins us now. Max, a pleasure, as always. Thank you for joining us. Has Israel manipulated Donald Trump yet again? What is the backstory on the so-called Israeli intelligence about the so-called Iranian plans to attack Air Force One? Well, if we look at this story, we can kind of see a microcosm of how the entire war on Iran unfolded. This is why the U.S. is still imposing a protracted war on Iran right now, primarily an economic war, which has devastated the global economy. And, you know, ask anyone

in real estate in the United States about interest rates right now. And it goes directly back to this war. So why did this happen? It's because Israel manipulated a demented intellectually, intellectually challenged, amoral, deeply corrupt president into waging this war over a period of years. So everyone is now finally talking in the mainstream media about this campaign of manipulation. Everyone knows now that Trump was hidden in a food, kind of like a food cart, sneaking out to a decoy flight in Ankara, Turkey, around the NATO summit, which is like a scene out of one of these Leslie Nielsen naked gun movies. Can you imagine him, like, huddled in there, like sweating and, you know, orange sweat,

pouring off his face. It's hilarious. Marco Rubio knowingly goes on the flight, which was supposedly going to be targeted by IRGC operatives with manpads, according to a... certain tip the CIA received, along with all the, all the, all the Trump staffers we know and disdain. And they are all going to be sent to their deaths, according to this tip, except for Donald Trump. And what's that woman, Natalie Harp, who escorts him everywhere, who's 35. He chose her to survive with him on his own. And he chose Hollywood Heggseth. And Pete Hegset, yeah, because he's the

ultimate yes man, who apparently had just lied to. him about munitions, but he still chose him to live. Of course, the plot was completely phony. We knew it came from Israel. The Wall Street Journal reported in July that Israel had fed a tip to the U.S. that the Iranians were planning to kill Trump at this summit. This was after the Khomeini funeral, which I reported on in which many common Iranians were in the streets calling for retaliation on Trump for killing their dear leader who they loved considered a guide. I interviewed Iranian leadership about whether assassination was actually a policy now. And to a person, they told me, no, our policy is to keep the strait of Hormuz closed

until we receive restitution for this war and justice and to debasify, to remove U.S. bases from the region. That's our retribution. But we still have to listen to people. Yesterday, Abbasaragciti, an Iranian foreign minister, declared we have no plans to kill Trump. He's doing a good enough job of destroying America. And that's, that's the official policy and that's, and that's, that's prudent. But the Israelis have manipulated Trump into believing that Iran has wanted to kill him. And this is how it began. I started working on like a little

timeline before we went live, starting in, on January 3rd, 2020, which is an eerie date, because that's also the date that Maduro is kidnapped. That's when Trump assassinated, Qasem Soleimani on his way to a peace conference in Iraq, based on phony Israeli intelligence claims that Iran was planning to attack U.S. troops in Iraq. And this is the killing that starts the whole cycle of escalation with Iran, move forward to July 12, 2024. And I think it's important to note the date, the precise date. That's when the FBI arrested a Pakistani national named Asaf Mershant, accusing him of plotting to assassinate Trump on behalf of the IR. G.C. It was a phony plot. The FBI was controlling it. The FBI was tipped about Mershant by a certain

overseas source, which was almost certainly Israeli. And, you know, the FBI guided this whole plot. So a day later, a day after Mershant is arrested, that's when Thomas Matthew Crooks attempts to assassinate Donald Trump in Butler. And what does the FBI do? How do they respond? They fly to Texas to interrogate Mershant in his cell about possible Iranian involvement. They really wanted to blame Iran for this. Three days later, Ken Delaney and you know him. He's the guy who was fired for letting the CIA vet his reporting. At NBC, he reports that the Biden administration obtained intel about an Iranian assassination

plot targeting Trump. Again, trying to frame Butler as an Iranian plot. Mike Walts does the same in Congress. The FBI feeds a phony threat weeks later to secret service. claiming the same thing that Israel just said, this is on the 2024 Trump campaign, that IRGC operatives are inside the United States with manpads planning to take out the president. So this prompts Trump to take his first decoy ghost flight back in 2024 on Steve Whitkoff's private jet while the rest of his campaign is supposedly sent to their deaths on Trump Force One.

It was, of course, a phony plot. Okay, a year later, Donald Trump is president. Israel has just launched a war on Iran without U.S. involvement, supposedly, in the middle of negotiations. It's June 15, 2025, and Netanyahu goes on Fox News for his big interview with Brett Baer, trying to draw the U.S. into the war. What does he say? He says, Iran, in his words, tried to assassinate the president twice, referring to the attempts at Butler and Mar-a-Lago, completely false, completely bogus. And then we have February 2026 when Netanyahu comes into the White House, sits in the situation room at the head of the table with Trump on the side, and provides Trump with more phony intelligence on how he needs to kill Ayatollah Khomeini and his Iranian leadership and starts the war.

The war was started based on this phony Israeli promise that regime change would ensue soon after these decapitation strikes. And now here we are. Iran is stronger than ever. It's emerging, as a global power with the Strait of Hormuz close. Its population is incredibly angry and indignant about that killing. They want revenge. And Israel has manipulated Trump all over again. And remember what Trump said after he killed Khomeini on February 28, 2026. He said, I got him before he got me, indicating that Trump believes all the phony Israeli intelligence. So why wouldn't they have manipulated him again? But now the CIA has come out to the Washington Post and said this was a low, we have low confidence in this Israeli intelligence,

and they're leaking to mainstream media, to the Washington Post in New York Times that Israel is manipulating Trump to keep him in the war. And there's another reason why Israel fed this phony intelligence to the Secret Service. It was to escalate against the host of the NATO summit, Turkey, and to prevent them from getting S-400 anti-aircraft systems from Russia and the F-35 from the United States, which Trump had promised them. So Israel's manipulating on a whole host of levels in order to keep Trump in the war and now to escalate against a NATO member state. How does he reject the advice and guidance of his own CIA?

What does he say to Ratcliffe, who's pretty much a lackey of his, when he prefers the the absurdities of Mossad to the investigation of his own intelligence people. Yeah, I think it's really sad that, you know, during the Iraq war, there were, there was ambassador Joe Wilson, someone who emerged from the national security and diplomatic establishment, who emerged as the whistleblower of the war and blew the whistle on the phony claims of, you know, yellow cake from Niger and the... Right. There's no one like that in this war. No one has emerged from the CIA, the NSC, the State Department to blow the whistle on all the phony intelligence. But now, as I said,

last week, the White House is leaking like a 19th century submarine. And I mean, there's a cowardice within the national security state and their failure to stand up to Israel. They were advising against this war from the beginning. The Pentagon Joint Chiefs were against the war. Dan Cain was leaking from the beginning. But Dan, you know, he was leaking that there aren't adequate munitions before the war was even launched. His career should be destroyed, along with Bradley Cooper's. Their reputation should be destroyed.

It is. They lack credibility, but they remain in their positions, and there have been no high-level resignations. So, you know, it's basically a bunch of cowards and war criminals in the national security state being plied by a tiny little apartheid state in its cutouts in and around Trump who are funding Trump to the hilt, Miriam Adelson being one, Donald Trump listening to them, and them being prepared to say, well, we were just following orders. Where else did we hear that? Nuremberg. Right. Now, you talk about senior military officials being fought. shouldn't the captain of the USS Abraham Lincoln be fired for the deplorable conditions that he's putting the young soldiers and Marines through?

I think Hongkow, the Navy Secretary, should be fired. This is a clownish mega loyalist who lost various campaigns in Virginia, a fanatical Vietnamese expat anti-commit. who has no credentials, who just held a meeting on August 11th with families of sailors who were telling him that their family members want to kill themselves at sea. And they're calling and saying they don't want to live another day. They've been out there for months and months and months. They're not getting any fresh food. They're eating like pieces of stale bread with velvita. They're not able to contact their family members.

members, they're certainly not able to see them. And now we learn from stars and stripes and military times that sailors on the USS Abraham Lincoln are jumping overboard or attempting to jump overboard. There have been several attempts at jumping overboard to commit suicide. And what has he done? What reforms have been put in place? We're not seeing any. This also goes to the top to Pete Hague Seth. And it's really just about the war. The U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln is attempting to impose a naval siege on Iran. It can't operate near Iran because of Iran's standoff weapons. It's unclear what effect it's even having. There have been fires on previous ships, on previous aircraft carriers that have been set by sailors to try to end their mission.

And they've reached the limit that the human psyche can withstand. Now, one thing that I think would improve morale and actually enable these sailors to withstand such a grueling mission would be a just war that was actually defending the country that they come from. And I think that's the subtext here, is these sailors know they're fighting a failed war for a psychotic little apartheid state that controls the president that is not the United States. They know, but they can't say that publicly. Iranian sailors and members of the Iranian Navy and IRGC that are, you know, getting bombed in the South around Syrac and Keshim Island and all around the Strait of Hormuz. They're eating a similar diet.

They get like two hard boiled eggs and a piece of bread a day. Actually, some sailors put out on social media that that's their diet. But they know they're defending their country. They have, their morale is high. because they know they're actually fighting for a cause they believe in. And so that's the subtext in the issue here, is these sailors know they're fighting for absolutely nothing in a glorified mercenary army,

and their needs and their psychological and basic physical needs are not being cared for. They're just cannon fodder for Israel. Here's a producer of a documentary on the USS Abraham Lincoln, summarizing what he has found and what he has been told. Chris, number eight. You guys, there's a mental health crisis happening aboard the USS Lincoln in the Middle East that no one is talking about, and mainly because the Navy is pretty much quashing it.

You will read online about food shortages, supply shortages, poor morale among crew members. That's because they've been at sea continuously for 250 days. They've been deployed a total of 271 days, 250 without a port of call. That's unheard of. Normally they would go to port every three to six weeks. They have not been to port in 38 weeks. Keep in mind there are 52 weeks in a year. And yes, the showers are moldy.

They're eating basically like a gruel kind of slop at this point. There is no deodorant. There is no toothpaste. My nephew has a friend on board there, and I was basically hearing updates last week when I was in the state in real time. They're not talking about the mental health crisis. Six people have tried to jump off that ship. The most recent was last Monday.

You know, when you have not touched land in 38 weeks in over 200 days, things start to happen to you mentally. You know, combine that with exhaustion and deadly mistakes start to happen. So, you know, this is how the Department of War, this is how Donald Trump treats our service men and women, whose lives are already being put in harm's way for a bullshit war of aggression that was supposed to be over in a matter of weeks. We are further putting their lives at risk out of sheer ineptitude. and neglect. It defies logic. It defies reason. And it defies basic humanity. X-Seth called this fake news. Yeah, that's all he can say. And they've been doing this for years. And it's particular to the Trump

administration. The USS Theodore Roosevelt was enforcing the containment of China back in March in April of 2020 when the COVID epidemic started to spread. And the sailors started getting infected on that ship. There were 4,800 sailors. And, you know, it was running through them like wildfire. And so their captain, I think his name was Brett Crozier. He sent a letter to the San Francisco Chronicle and to the U.S. media complaining that they were not being allowed to go to port to treat sailors.

And, you know, pandemonium was erupting aboard. And so what was the Trump administration's response? The acting secretary of the Navy fired Crozier and that was it and said, you know, you're not loyal and screamed at him. So they had this record of treating sailors and service members like absolute fodder for empire. Look at the last four service members who were killed at the Mwafix Salty base. in Jordan, Trump removed them from the official role of those who were killed in combat in order to save face and claimed, oh, they were killed during a ceasefire, even though the U.S. was attacking Iran.

These were mostly black and brown service members who likely joined the U.S. military, not because they wanted to fight for their country in an Israeli proxy like Jordan, but because they wanted to move up in class and have a more secure future in a glorified mercenary army, and now they're dead. I'm going to jump to another topic, but the Abraham Lincoln has 5,000 sailors. You have seven suicide attempts, more than one per thousand. I never heard of that, even in the worst times in the U.S. military. And your point is right on.

they're not fighting for a war they believe in. They're fighting Nets and Yahoo's war and they know it. Yeah, and Judge, you're talking about, you're talking 5,000 sailors. Think of how many families are attached to that ship and how many families are being shattered right now. Right. What did this Vietnamese fanatic

that is the Secretary of the Navy say to these families? Yeah, I don't know. I only know there was this meeting. of what here's something one person said to him. My son is currently on that ship and listening to him say that he and his shipmates constantly think about jumping off the ship just for relief is so hard to listen to. Wow. Switching gears, are there negotiations going on negotiations and air quotes between the Israelis and the Lebanese? And who is representing the Lebanese in those negotiations? Yeah, who is really representing the Lebanese? Well, ostensibly it's President Joseph Aoun, who actually wasn't elected and his prime minister,

and his prime minister who also represents no party and was not elected, but we published a piece by Wyatt Reed at the gray zone, which identifies the hidden hand behind those negotiations to, to violate Lebanese law, violate the Lebanese constitution and normalize with Israel while Israel is violently occupying southern Lebanon, blowing up at least 24 ancient Lebanese villages in southern Lebanon to ethnically cleanse the Shia population. In the midst of all this, there is enormous momentum to normalize with Israel. There was just a meeting in July at a restaurant, at the four seasons in D.C. several U.S. senators, Democrat and Republican were there. members of Trump's cabinet were there, key members. Benjamin Netanyahu and his wife were there.

And there was one main Lebanese representative. His name is Antun Senawi, spelled S-E-H-N-A-O-U-I. And Wyatt Reed kind of tells the story of Senawi and how he has established a kind of secret army of media operatives, propagandists, even former Treasury. U.S. Treasury officials and militia men to advance these illegal normalization initiative. Sinawe has been exposed most prominently in a five-part series by the French publication,

Lorient Today. And what we did was sort of summarize and synthesize that investigation and build off it to explain how he has recruited operative from Winnap or the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, which are two, the key Israeli-run or aligned think tanks in Washington, to push for normalization with Israel. And he's paid treasury officials to debank, banks that are linked to Shia institutions in Lebanon. He has a private, fascist Christian militia called the Soldiers of God, which has defended his banks, which have been blamed for the financial crash that destroyed Lebanon's economy back in 2019. Right. And he is married or is in a romantic relationship with now with Morgan Ortegis,

who was Trump's envoy to Lebanon and really remains one of the most influential figures pushing Trump's policy on Lebanon. She is an evangelical Christian convert to Judaism who, After the killing of Hassan Nasrallah's leader, she went to Israel and urged Israel to attack his funeral at Sports City Stadium in Beirut, which would have killed thousands of civilians, an absolute fanatic. During a, this will tell you everything about Senawi. He appeared with her at their coming out party was earlier this year in April at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. He was, as an ostensible non-Jew, inscribed onto their wall of donors. And she declared that her husband has been trained by his own family to support Israel and the Jewish people, and that he is a dedicated Christian Zionist. Wait a minute, isn't he the negotiator for Lebanon?

He's not the negotiator. He's actually not, he may not even be allowed in Lebanon, but this is a billionaire corrupt banker who is paying all of the propagandists and people pushing the normalization from within Washington and paying and enticing figures in Beirut. So he's sort of the power behind the throne, but he's someone who you may not have known about before today or before these investigations appeared this month. And that really shows you how deeply undemocratic the Lebanese government is and how this is all proceeding against the will of the Lebanese public while their country is occupied. It's all being instrumentalized by a billionaire who,

according to his uncle, is fascinated with Judaism and may even believe that he himself is Jewish and is married to an evangelical Christian convert to Judaism, who, when she went to meet with the president of Lebanon, Joseph Aoun, shook his hand. with a star of David Ring on her hand, absolutely, you know, bizarre symbolism. And what's next for this? I think we'll see more meetings between corrupt Lebanese officials in Washington with Israel brokered by the U.S. while Israel continues to literally destroy and wipe off the map parts of Lebanon and the Lebanese public stands in in on near total opposition to this here is um israeli uh i guess he's the defense minister israel cats it's very brief but

very telling number 14 chris under no circumstances to be retreat not in lebanon not in syria not in gaza from the security zones the lesson of october 7th is that we protect the residents by having the IDF present in these places and defending them. What are you appreciating for if Israel will never leave Lebanon? Well, in a previous appearance, I think it was at a conference or an event sponsored by the pro Netanyahu Pro Likud Channel 14, Israel Katz, the defense minister boasted that Israel had blown up 24 villages in southern Lebanon and that it had destroyed Gaza. So basically he boasted of committed genocide.

And he said these villages were hundreds of years old and we blew them up. There's a new Financial Times investigation outlining in clinical detail how Israel is systematically destroyed entire villages in southern Lebanon with the aim of permanently displacing their population and stealing their land. Israel's goal is to displace the Shia population entirely because they can't defeat them at the ballot box and they can't defeat the – Hezbollah militarily. Wow. Last topic. What happened recently in the West Bank that caused Ambassador Mike Huckabee, of all people, to refer to the Israeli so-called settlers as terrorists?

Well, this is, yeah, I'll try to summarize it briefly, but settler terror, the settlers have been let off the chain this summer, and allowed to freely rampage through Palestinian villages. You know, I was talking actually to a Palestinian, who's families in the West Bank now and said, now you get up and the settlers are actually in your street, whereas before you could maybe not leave your town in the Ramallah Bire district because the settlers would be outside of town

near a checkpoint, but now they're in your street and they're with guns threatening to kill you. The settlers have killed scores of dozens of Palestinians this summer, and it's because the Trump administration gave them a green light when they came into office. The Trump administration removed several violent settlers who had been involved in lethal crimes from the U.S. sanctions list as soon as they came into office, and they also elisted Idemar Ben-Gvier, the sort of highest-ranking settler fanatic, who's the security minister of Israel, who has been arming the settlers and providing them with

all-terrain vehicles to increase their propensity for terror. Earlier this year, a settler who's known for violence named Yanon Levy murdered an English teacher and peace activist named Adé Hatalin. and he had actually worked on a pretty renowned documentary called No Other Land. Then there was just recently settlers surrounding the homes of several Palestinians, basically besieging them in the village of Kusra. And this is what Huckabee is referring to. And basically for public relations purposes,

because it's gotten so extreme. And there's the IDF removed those settlers. And Huckabee then followed and called them terrorists. And so now they're trying for propaganda purposes to clean up the mess that they created. Huckabee, who functions basically as the additional Israeli ambassador and the Trump administration. But they gave the green light for this rampage of settler terror. And I should mention that maybe one week ago, the defense minister we were just talking about, Israel Cats declared that there's no such thing as settler terror and that Israel will no longer

classify any act of violence by a Jew as terrorism. Only Palestinians can afford. So will anybody be prosecuted for what the settler terrorists have been doing? Well, when they get prosecuted, they get a slap on the wrist. I'm sorry, when I said Israel Cats, I meant it's the new shinbet director. So previously under the shinbet, which is Israel's general security services, there were occasions when settlers were held in administrative detention. That's when you get held for suspicion of terrorism. One guy I could point to is Hymn Perlman, who went on a stabbing spree of Palestinians who were just standing on the road. And he was actually sort of tortured. His lawyer was Idemar Ben-Gavir.

He was held under administrative detention by the shin bet, and the settlers got very mad about that. Palestinians who are accused of throwing rocks, they get administrative detention. So the new shin bet director is basically saying, no more administrative detention for settlers, which gives them the green light to go crazy. Well, Max, thank you very much, my dear friend. We really want to cross the board and the topics. And I know you're traveling and I appreciate your time more than I can even tell you, as do all of our viewers. There you go.

Trump in the food cart. I wonder if Erdogan knew about this, Max. That's an interesting cartoon that Chris put together there. Would they have even told the president of Turkeya that this was going on? Well, this is just so humiliating for Trump. And I know they're having a good laugh about it in Tehran, and they probably are as well. Ankara and everybody around the world is laughing about the president hiding in a food cart after all the damage he's done. It's humiliating to the United States along with the lack of munitions.

It's like an empire that just can't get it up anymore. Yeah. Thank you, Max. Safe travels. All the best. We'll see you next week. Thanks a lot, Judge. Sure. Coming up next, if you're watching us live in 26 minutes at 3 o'clock, Colonel Douglas McGregor, Judge Lepal, for judging freedom.