Judging Freedom - Max Blumenthal: How Long Can Netanyahu Stay in Power?

Episode Date: June 5, 2025

Max Blumenthal: How Long Can Netanyahu Stay in Power?See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

you Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Thursday, June 5th, 2025. My dear friend Max Blumenthal joins us now. Max, always a pleasure. Thank you for joining us. You have a startling piece out about this group Palantir and what they have done in Israel and what they are doing in the United States and now their satanic collaboration with the federal government of the United States. But before we get there, what are your thoughts on the Ukraine drone attacks? I mean, does anybody take seriously President Trump's statement to President Putin that the United States didn't know about this? Well, if Trump didn't know about it and everyone wants to blame the deep state, then Trump has lost control of the most critical areas of diplomacy and he is allowing the British,

the most radical, dangerous country engaged in supporting Ukraine to take control and sabotage him along with radical actors from Mike Pompeo to no relation to me, Richard Blumenthal and Lindsey Graham, who claims to be America first to completely sabotage diplomacy. And that that's been happening, this has been happening since early May. So let's step back a second before we talk about this daring drone attack, this brazen drone attack which has been prepared for over a year, maybe 18 months, and obviously was conducted with British support. In early May, sorry March, I'm talking about March, in early March Trump humiliated Zelensky and everyone, including us, believed this was the moment that Trump would use to suspend intelligence cooperation with the Ukrainian SBU, which has been carrying out all these terror attacks, assassinations inside Russia, and withhold weapons to bring them to the table and bring an end to this war and end the killing as his Vice President, JD Vance said.

One week after that took place, Trump restored intelligence cooperation and restored weapons deliveries to Ukraine and the brakes were off on this attack leading up to the landmark Istanbul talks. And so just hours before Putin and Zelensky's team were to meet in Istanbul, Ukraine carries out these attacks and we at the gray zone have been exclusively reporting with leaked documents that no one else had reported on that there was a cabal inside British military intelligence

called Project Alchemy that had been planning attacks on Russian train lines, drone attacks on Russian military bases from inside Russia, and we revealed the blueprints produced by this British military intelligence cabal to attack the Kirch Bridge. All of that has happened in the past 72 hours. All of that. And we've had the blueprints out there. This is obviously a British attack. And one more point. The US and Russia have a treaty that all strategic bombers must be able to be seen by satellites from the air in order to prevent a surprise nuclear attack. Which country in NATO in the West is not a part of that treaty? Britain, the UK. And so it's just another piece of evidence adding to their desire to attack.

Your analysis is 100% consistent with Scott Ritter, who says the CIA surely knew about it, but the plans, the money, the idea, the operations were MI6. Talk to me about how dangerous it is, you alluded to this in the initial part of your statement, if John Ratcliffe, the director of CIA, and Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, if they in fact did not know, or if in fact they did know and didn't tell Trump, I don't know which is worse. One is incompetence and the other is deceptive and insubordinate. Well, it looks like the five I's have rendered Trump blind

because- That's a good line, good line, Max. The five I's are of the five English speaking countries, Great Britain, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, United States that frequently share and almost without guidelines share intelligence. Go ahead. So the thinking is, and I'm sure Scott Ritter was all over this, that this was planned under Rishi Sunak's MI6. And it took that level of preparation, laying the groundwork for storing drones inside a

hangar in Russia, finding the strategic bombers, finding the right time, and then executing it in order to sabotage negotiations in Istanbul on the day after Richard Blumenthal and Lindsey Graham, the two, the Neo-Con duo were in Kiev. And this followed a visit by Senator Mark Kelly at the same time that Ukraine executed cyber attacks, which apparently targeted Elon Musk's Twitter X. So I mean it's clear what's been, what has been going on here that this was an attempt to sabotage Trump under the Five Eyes agreement. You would think GCHQ would have to tell NSA and that the CIA would learn from the MI6 that this was about to take place. But what took place was after this attack, if you were on

Twitter X or social media, you would see all the pro-Trump-maga influencers basically flipping their wigs, freaking out that this had sabotaged Trump's plan for this grand deal in Istanbul. So Trump clearly activated his influencers and now Trump himself is under enormous pressure from the media. This is what they always do, the Beltway Press in the Rose Garden, is they always pressure the president from the neocon position to do more war. They never pressure him against it. And so Trump just had a press conference and was pushed on applying more sanctions on Russia. He's constantly under attack by the press for not sanctioning Russia more. And it means another step away from diplomacy, sanctioning the country that is already the most sanctioned country on the planet. Over a thousand sanctions have

been placed on Russia and the ruble has not turned to rubble. So what is the point of doing more? It's that Trump finds himself overwhelmed once again, as in his first term, by the preponderance of neocon forces that surround him. Did you notice that in the, Chris, do we have the full screen of Trump's truth social about his conversation with, there it is, it was a good conversation, but not a conversation

that will lead to immediate peace. President Putin did say and very strongly that he will have to respond to the recent attack on the airfields. Now, there's a little bit after that, but it's, it's fabulous. Normally, when he recounts a threat by Putin, he counters with a threat. Not this time. Well, what's the point? I mean, what threat can he enact?

Well, the point is that Putin's response and Trump's brain would be justifiable, or Trump knows that we knew about it ahead of time and he better not make this worse. Well, either way, Trump recognizes that his diplomacy has failed. It's on the precipice of complete collapse and that Vladimir Putin really doesn't have an interest in stopping the Russian offensive. The Ukrainian attacks inside Russia were evidence of desperation by the Ukrainian armed forces. And we've seen it again and again as they collapse on the battlefield, they resort to terrorist style attacks on Russian infrastructure against Russian civilians. A seven-month old child had to be medevaced from Briansk from this train to Moscow to survive the attack.

And so if Putin keeps pushing, he will maintain the support of the global south, which he has. If Putin reacts in a hot-blooded fashion and considers these threats to be some existent, these attacks to be some existential threat to Russia, he will lose that vital diplomatic support, including from China. And that was the point of these attacks. So it doesn't really matter what Trump says or if negotiations actually go through in Istanbul. And you can see the attitude of Zelensky

to negotiations as well, where Zelensky has come out and said, we are not seeking an end of hostilities, we're seeking total victory. He is drunk on the delusions being fed to him primarily by the British and the rest of the European leaders. Here is somebody that you and I rarely agree with, but on this he seems to be spot on. This is Steve Bannon ripping into Lindsey Graham and ripping into Zelensky for stirring the pot towards World War III. Chris, cut number seven. We can't have people over there telling the Ukrainians that we're going to back more.

What we're trying to do is calm this down. What President Trump is trying to say is, look, we can't have Lindsey Graham, and particularlyensky leading us into a third world war with a deep strike into Russia. And Putin came back today and said, Hey, we're going to get to the bottom of this and we're going to see who's accountable in Ukraine and beyond. And that was a message to the United States. What he's doing over there right now is stirring it up. He's giving Ukrainians false hope that we're there to support them

on engaging Russia in a kinetic conflict. And we are not. Two things ought to happen. Either cancel his passport and don't let him back in the country or put him in jail if he comes back. And people better wake up to the fact that we're getting sucked into this war. If the intelligence community actually did this, this is an act of war against Russia. The American people vote to go to war with the Russian people. I don't remember a senator trying to conduct his own foreign policy and then he'll post, oh I have 80 votes supporting my legislation to increase the sanctions on Russia. I don't know if this guy is Trump's golf buddy and ear whisperer much longer. Well, Bannon was speaking on behalf of Trump and the Vance faction in the Trump White House.

But this message should be coming from Trump. Trump actually sounds weak here, and he vacillates between Graham and the Vance faction and hasn't taken any clear action. As I said, back in March, he restored intelligence cooperation with Ukraine and kept the weapons flowing and what did you think was going to happen? Friedrich Mertz, I mean, Bannon alluded to long range strikes into Russia. Friedrich Mertz, the German chancellor, has authorized Taurus missile strikes deep into Russia. Where is that going to lead? It's only going to lead to escalation. And the point is,

the Europeans have no plan for peace. They're putting forward no concrete plan for peace. Their only plan is for more war. It is a march of folly that is destroying their own economies and their own societies. The European center is collapsing, their liberal democracies are collapsing, and they don't care. They want war for its own sake. And their allies in Washington are the most extreme neocons like Lindsey Graham, who just called for or supported an Israeli assassination strike on a small aid boat heading to Gaza containing Greta Thunberg and several US citizens.

He joked, I hope they can swim. So this is a real strange, Lovian psychopath who is forming the direct bridge with the EU to undermine whatever's left of Trump's diplomacy, which I think will ultimately fail. Our friend and colleague, Professor Jeff Sachs, says that everything Mertz has done in the foreign policy field since the day he became chancellor is a step closer to, and it's intended to provoke a war with Russia.

They can't win a war with Russia. They can't even sustain battles against Russia. I don't get it, Max. I just don't get what goes through their minds. Well, certainly the lives of Ukrainian men is not one of the considerations going through their minds. And there have been small protests across Ukraine against the vans, the death vans,

that are shipping men against their will to the front lines to die. And from Russia's point of view, the Russian strategic calculus is any negotiation that mandates a strategic pause, a short ceasefire, will allow Ukraine to remobilize, gather more weapons, and gather more diplomatic support for the next phase of battle. But again, human life is not one of the considerations here. And the West cannot, I mean, what they're really afraid of is giving up Donetsk, Lugansk, the other oblasts that Russia has taken, which are majority, where there is a majority Russian

population, and accepting defeat after throwing so much wood into the fire, that would, in their minds, contribute to the unraveling of NATO. And they just can't simply allow it. They cannot accept what they would see as defeat, when in fact it's really just a compromise in what was a civil conflict inside Ukraine that they have turned into a global conflict. Here's the Russian Foreign Ministry special envoy talking just what you said, this was all intended to make Russia abandon negotiations,

cut number four. This large-scale incident has Ukrainian roots. Terrorist methods are internationally prohibited, but they're used at state level by Ukraine. Kiev is fundamentally not satisfied with the dialogue being organized. Therefore, immediately on the eve of the next round of negotiations, a whole series of terrorist acts was committed, which emphatically sought to force Russia to abandon negotiations. But we do not consider it possible for us to take this kind of action,

because negotiations and military activities will be separated. And as for terrorist actions, I think that their organizers will receive appropriate responses. There will definitely be no forgiveness or backing down in this sense. But their mission of forcing Russia to abandon negotiations by heavy pressure simply did not work out. simply did not work out. I wonder what CIA agents knew and didn't know and what Ratcliffe and Gabbard knew and didn't know and who's competent and who's incompetent and who keeps information from Trump.

It's just mind boggling. I accept what you and Ritter have said about the British origin and maintenance of this, but clearly people at Langley knew about this. It's inconceivable that they didn't know about it. Yeah, just two final comments on this. One, Tulsi Gabbard, her primary role so far seems to have just been to protect Donald Trump, to form kind of a praetorian guard for the president within the IC. And that has played out with her actually politicizing intelligence, where members of the US intelligence analysts, career analysts,

confirmed what was pretty much obvious to everyone who pays attention to Latin America, including some very anti-Venezuelan or elements that consider Maduro to be an enemy, have concluded, which is that this gang, Tren de Aragua, has nothing to do with the Venezuelan government anymore, is not being directed by Caracas to ship migrants into the U.S., to commit violence in the U.S. And these analysts confirmed that and Tulsi Gabbard condemned them and fired them because it interfered with Trump's invocation of the Alien Enemies Act from 1798 to carry out mass deportations. So her role has been primarily political and then Trump's given her a bunch of junk to deal with like look at the Epstein files or you know here keep busy

with this but I don't see Tulsi Gabbard really being that engaged. The Signalgate chats where she was basically supporting strikes on Yemen after denouncing the wars on Yemen from Congress, really showed how much she'd fallen in line as a loyal soldier. And then the other point I wanna make is just to reiterate how important the leaks that Kit Klarenberg has reviewed and reported on for the gray zone about Project Alchemy, this secret cell within British military intelligence

that we've exposed at the gray zone is to understanding these attacks because these are blueprints that we have exposed for attacking the Kirch Bridge, specifically to provoke Russia to escalate. And remember, the first attack on the Kirch Bridge caused Russia to begin attacking Ukraine's electrical and energy infrastructure. And they've constructed what they call stay behind armies influenced by the CIA and NATO's Operation Gladio from the 1970s to carry out attacks inside Russia, as well as attacks on Russian railways. This is all playing out before our eyes and the rest of the media won't report it. So this is a very British, I don't know, I want to call it a very British coup.

It's a very British proxy war. Keir Starmer just acknowledged in Parliament, speaking in Parliament, that it is a proxy war. And remember last, I think it was last July, Starmer embraced the role of being a war prime minister. So labor has been captured by this military intelligence cell and it's reverberating all the way to Moscow and escalating a war that should have been over. You mentioned a few minutes ago Greta Thunberg who of course is on one of the ships attempting to bring food and medical supplies to Gaza. Here's Lindsey Graham's opinion of all this, Chris. Hope Greta and her friends can swim. Meaning what? The Israelis will sink the boat that she's on and let them drown in the Mediterranean, and this is being lauded by a United States Senator who plays golf with the president. Yeah, he's calling for the killing of a few unarmed activists who are seeking to bring food to starving people in Gaza.

He thinks it's funny. And his peer group must think it's funny as well. Greta Thunberg became famous for, she was basically this poster child of global billionaire-backed foundations that wanted to impose very strict regulations on manufacturing and eliminate all fossil fuels by, I guess guess 2030 in order to stop climate change. And she was the darling of the Davos elite. I think she might have even spoken, she spoke at Davos and now she's kind of gone into a realm of, in her view, moral consistency that is unacceptable to the liberal global elite and to the neocon fanatics in Washington. And so no one's sticking up for her that I've seen from among her old Davos backers against Lindsey Graham. But you can see the comments responding to that tweet are just thousands and thousands of average people being outraged because they know what's happening

in Gaza. The media, the legacy media might not be reporting the horrors that we're seeing out of Gaza, but everybody else can see it. And Greta Thunberg is one of the few celebrities who's actually acting on principle, putting her money where her mouth is. And now she's a target for assassination. That, I should mention, has been circled by drones already in the Mediterranean and international waters. And we should remember the Mavi Marmara, the Turkish aid ship that was attacked by Israeli commandos, killing nine activists, including one American citizen.

Another flotilla ship, I think a year or two later, was attacked in a Greek port by an Israeli frogman team from underwater. And two months, or I think it was one month ago in the Mediterranean, another flotilla ship was attacked by an Israeli loitering drone, which actually fired explosive rounds into its hull with activists on board. And there's no outrage about this from within Europe, even though this is happening in international waters. Is there outrage in Israel? Of course not.

Of course not. Of course not. I mean, we talked last week about the Penn State poll showing over 80% of Israelis supporting the ethnic cleansing of the full population of Gaza. Today in Tel Aviv, there was a gay pride march in which the European diplomats representing all the Western European countries participated, when have they ever marched for against the Holocaust in Gaza or done anything? I mean, they're still there. Last subject matter, what is Palantir? Who is this fellow Alex Karp, and what is its relationship to the federal government? Well, we probably should have started 25 minutes ago, because it'll take

government? Well, we probably should have started 25 minutes ago because it'll take that long to explain how deeply Palantir, which is a private spying and what I would call a death tech or necrotech firm, has penetrated into Western national security states. And we're not just talking about the US, the UK and states all throughout the Five Eyes are adapting Palantir products into their surveillance. The New York Times published a long front page piece on a system called Foundry, which is kind of a centralized database with the private information of Americans, of American citizens, as well as immigrants in the country being shared throughout government agencies. It allows the rapid sharing. So it's kind of like a big brother system.

Many people in Trump's grassroots base are outraged about this because they have libertarian tendencies. They're calling it the basis for a social credit system in the United States. And I think they're correct about that. But there is also Maven, which is a Palantir product which the entire U.S. military, the entire Pentagon uses for targeting in Syria, Yemen, Ukraine and elsewhere. Palantir is assisting the Israeli

military with its targeting, providing technology for its dystopian lavender system, which directs the entire genocide in Gaza. It's an AI targeting system that's just slaughtering people across the Gaza Strip based on personal information that has decided through machine learning and language through machine learning and language learning and language models that they are a threat or could be designated as a terrorist. Alex Karp, the CEO of Palantir, is a messianic loudmouth who has boasted that in a shareholder meeting he said Palantir is here to disrupt and make the institutions we partner with the very the very best in the world and when it's necessary to scare enemies and on occasion kill them. He can't stop boasting about killing people. He was protested at a conference by a Palestinian woman and he openly said, yeah, we're killing

Palestinians, but I think most of them are terrorists. He's a militant Zionist. He describes himself as a socialist, but it's very clear. And he said this, that he believes that social unrest is coming, and that he is designing the tools for the Western power elite to be able to restore control. And that's why he has said that disruption is very good for Palantir. I wonder how much stock in Palantir the Trump organization owns. Well, I mean, it's Peter Thiel, the co founder of Peter Thiel co founded Palantir with Alex Karp in 2004. They had one client and one client only at the time, the CIA, which was the main

investor through its venture capital arm in QTEL. And now they've grown into this global behemoth that forms the backbone of Western national security states. But Peter Thiel finessed a lot of those contracts through the Trump administration by being close to Trump ideologically and personally sponsoring the career of JD Vance, sponsoring sponsoring the career of JD Vance, sponsoring Marco Rubio and so many other figures. So Palantir is in many ways in control of the Trump White House to the outrage and indignation of large parts of Trump's base,

especially the libertarian elements, and they should be angry and they should be outraged. But we've been talking about Palantir for over a decade when they were exposed through the Snowden files for holding an enemies list. They had an enemies list of journalists including Glenn Greenwald that they wanted to target and I was just at Eric Schmidt, Google co-founder and military contractor, Eric Schmidt's special competitive studies project AI Expo in Washington, DC. They let you in?

They let me in and they kicked me out pretty quickly. You can look at my Twitter account for video of me being kicked out, why I was kicked out. But what I wanted to mention was one of the main booths that was, you know, sort of center stage, right when you enter the exhibition hall was Palantir's booth. And I watched two journalists approach them for comment or to talk about foundry in the New York Times article. And you would think like some grand, this massive firm would have a PR person, a slick talking PR person to kind of deflect critical questions. But instead they had a bunch of mercenary like thugs

who would surround the reporters, immediately call the police on them for just asking questions. And I was kicked out ultimately because I filmed another reporter trying to ask them questions. I didn't even interact with them. So that's where Palantir is.

Like they're very thin skinned, they're very aggressive and hostile to any scrutiny. And yet they are in control of the Trump White House. Their stock is surging as we speak because of this disturbing New York Times report, Wall Street has responded with enthusiasm. And that really tells you everything we need to know about Palantir's model. Max Blumenthal, thank you, my dear friend. We really covered the gamut and I

appreciate all you've done. This is like hours worth of information in 30 minutes. Thank you, my dear friend. Now I got to do a Greyzone live stream and I don't know if I have any juice left. I bet you do. Give my regards to Aaron and we'll see you next week. All the best. That's a lot, Judge. Thank you. And coming up later this afternoon, actually in just a half an hour,

at three o'clock Eastern, Professor John Mearsheimer, at four o'clock Eastern, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, at 4.30 Eastern, from somewhere in the heart of Russia, Pepe Escobar. Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom. MUSIC