Judging Freedom - Max Blumenthal: ICE and Freedom.

Episode Date: April 17, 2025

Max Blumenthal: ICE and Freedom.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, April 17th, 2025. Max Blumenthal joins us now. Max, it's a pleasure. Thank you for accommodating my schedule today. Does ICE, and you have a unique way to characterize that acronym, ICE, does ICE view its mission as interrupting illegal ideas? Did ICE once post that on its website? And then when somebody pointed out to them, there's no such thing as an illegal idea,

they took it down? That's right. And the reason I call ICE the Israeli censorship enforcers is because those ideas obviously relate to Israel Palestine and they are considered anti-semitic ideas. What does anti-semitic constitute in this case? It's the IHRA definition that is being weaponized by governments from the Trump administration to Germany to conflate anti-Zionism, which could take the form of just outrage and opposition to the Israeli genocide that claimed the lives

of a dozen more children last night as Israel bombed tents of people in a safe zone to opposition to Israel as an ethnosupremacist state that has to warehouse non-Jews as surplus humanity. That is considered anti-Semitism, according apparently to ICE, because it's what ICE is arresting all of these students around the country for. Most recently, Mohsen Madhawi, a Columbia University student who was a legal resident of the United States. He didn't break into the United States and he was at a citizenship interview in Vermont and Trump's ICE Gestapo arrested him there

and took him thousands of miles away to the Northwest Federal Prison. I believe that's in Washington State, another one of these privatized prisons owned by GEO Group, which is making a fortune off the Trump administration. And then you have Mahmoud Khalil, who was arrested by ICE at his apartment, basically disappeared, taken to Louisiana. He's being held there. And the Trump administration has not charged him with anything. His rap sheet, which was declassified consists of anti-accuses of anti-Semitic thoughts. And Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, who's basically his job is, is to be the

brown guy who gets the brown people out. Uh, doesn't have as much influence over actual diplomacy has has said that what he aims to do is get these lunatics out of our country. So again, thought crimes, lunatics, people who think the wrong way, and ISIS charged itself with stopping ideas at the border. So just come out and tell us which ideas are illegal and that you don't believe in the First Amendment

of the Constitution, just as you don't believe in the First Amendment of the Constitution, just as you don't believe in Supreme Court orders. Judge Boesberg, the judge who has found probable cause to hold the Trump administration in contempt and now has the unenviable task of deciding who, somewhere along the chain of command from Donald Trump down to the lawyers in his courtroom actually committed the contempt in his 46 page opinion ripped into Secretary Rubio. A, because when Judge Bosberg ordered and another judge, Judge Zinnis, ordered Mr. Garcia returned. Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State, posted on X, oops, too late, and a smiley face.

Judge Boesberg ripped into him for that. Marco Rubio should also be humiliated because his own State Department, along with Tony Blinken's State Department, has condemned the prison in El Salvador, visited by Kristi Noem, as violating basic humanitarian standards, and now he's boasting that a person, an innocent human being, was sent there. What's the complaint against the guy who was at his citizenship interview in Vermont?

What did they even say he did? Is it another thought crime? Yeah, I mean, we're hearing a lot about Kilmar Abrego, the guy who was dubiously accused of being MS-13 and ordered back to the US by the Supreme Court from the CICOT torture dungeon in El Salvador. But we're not hearing as much about Mohsen Madhawi who was never accused of any crime.

There's he by all accounts was the one of someone you would want in the United States. What he did was he participated as a fairly outspoken personality in the Columbia University encampments. And Zionist vigilante groups like Canary Mission and Bataar USA are feeding the names and faces of anyone they can find who's a permanent green card holder or is in the US on a student visa who participated in these demonstrations against the genocide in Gaza

to the US state security, DHS, FBI, and then Rubio yanks their visas immediately without investigating, and they get picked up by ICE wherever they are. This is revelatory of an Israeli intelligence network operating inside the United States, specifically Canary Mission. It's obviously a front for Israeli intelligence,

meddling in US politics, meddling in US society, and having total carte blanche to get people deported because the Trump administration is occupied by Netanyahu's government, the Likud party, and their paymasters in the form of Miriam Adelson, Donald Trump's largest donor other than Elon Musk, and it's Adelson and the Israelis who are calling the shots on all of these issues and shattering the First Amendment in the process. I mean, this is the real scandal.

This is the heart of the issue. And it's for some, for whatever reason, the Democrats are very reluctant to touch this. Rachel Maddow had a segment last night or yesterday showing footage of people protesting outside all of these holding facilities for these students who've been detained waving Palestinian flags. And she didn't mention the word Gaza or Palestine once. It was like she was afraid to even say it.

Afraid that ICE might arrest these students if she characterized them as being Palestinian or pro-Gaza. This is just... No, the Democrats just don't want to take the side of Palestine. Oh, I see. I see. I see.

I see. Because they'll lose donations. I don't know what the Democrats stand for today, Max. And the Republicans, for that matter, seem to stand for whatever Trump wants, no matter how authoritarian it might be. Did ICE recently order an American citizen, a lawyer from Boston, Massachusetts, out of the country? Yeah.

I'm not, her name isn't coming to mind right now, but she was an immigration lawyer as they're being targeted up and down the country, up and down the coast everywhere. But this lawyer received a email from the Department of Homeland Security telling her that she had seven days to leave the country to self-deport. She's a US citizen who was born in the United States and was shocked and went back to them and said, what is happening here? And they said, oh, just an administrative error.

We meant to send this to somebody else, which is odd enough. But I wondered if this might've been sort of a trial balloon just to see how far they could go and just to terrorize an immigration lawyer since they're the ones who are kind of standing in the way and intervening with all of these arbitrary deportations where people who are working in the country, who are living in the interior, who have been here, many of them have

been here almost their entire lives and they're just trying to snatch and grabbing people, children, families left and right and the immigration lawyers are this are this problem because they want to take them to the courts have due process. So I wonder if this is just an intimidation attempt. It's something I've never seen before. Chris just gave me her name, Nicole Mishironi. This is the person we're talking about. Yeah, that's right. When you were stopped at JFK and asked among other things if you've ever appeared on this show, was it ICE that stopped you? Yeah, actually someone was just stopped returning from the Virgin Islands and has been in a federal immigration prison for nine days. Virgin Islands is in the U.S. I was stopped by Customs and

Border Protection. And it was Dallas, it wasn't JFK, right. The person that's been in custody for nine days, an American citizen? I think it's a legal green card holder. Flying from one part of the United States to another. Correct. Does ICE know that the American Virgin Islands, like Puerto Puerto Rico is the United States? I mean, I used to jump in off the proverbial porch right now. They don't care. It's obvious they don't care. And when I was interrogated or questioned, it was sort of like a friendly

questioning session, I was asked about the anti-Semites, the communists of our time, I guess, in this new McCarthy era, people including Medea Benjamin, co-founder of Code Pink. And I didn't know it was her because they asked me about her birth name, Susan Benjamin, as well as various other people who appeared to have been student protesters that they were looking for. So they were wondering if I would snitch or collect intelligence. At airports, you are in a legal gray zone. Customs and Border Protection will tell you you have no rights here. You don't have the right to see a lawyer. And the less you talk, the more you uphold your constitutional right to remain silent,

the more we will harass and interrogate you. And you don't have the right to hold on to your devices. They can take your phone if they want. So they used me to kind of collect intelligence there. I didn't say anything or know anything. But I expect it again, and this is happening to so many activists and journalists and now lawyers across the country under this new kind of immigration regime. understand it, behind the recent either firings or frog marchings out of the Pentagon of three people very close to Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. Well, the one person who was marched out of the Pentagon was Dan Caldwell, who used to work with

Pete Hegseth, that is his nonprofit advocacy group. And then he went on to defense priorities and emerged in Washington as one of the leading veteran foreign policy thinkers who was a so-called restrainer, very skeptical of the US going to war on Iran or tempting war with China. And so he was targeted immediately when he was nominated by an outlet called Jewish Insider.

Jewish Insider, it's just like a front for the Israel lobby and especially the Likud Wing, the neocons run this. And he was heavily targeted, but he made it into the Pentagon. Now he's frog marched out. At the time he was marched out, there were several stories that had been the product of leaks.

One related to Elon Musk visiting the Pentagon, which caused a stir. But now there's a new story out. And the new story, this is the biggest one. It's in the New York Times. I'm sure most people watching this have read it. It's about how Trump called off after a month of deliberation, an Israeli strike on Iran,

and that the Israelis were pushing just like full court press on Trump to support this strike. The Israelis wanted to do a commando mission inside Iran, attack nuclear facilities, and spark a regional war. And Trump eventually put the kibosh, inside Iran, attack nuclear facilities, and spark a regional war. And Trump eventually put the kibosh, but only after the restrainers, including presumably Dan Caldwell, but also Tulsi Gabbard and Pete Hegseth was named as a figure who opposed this strike, they pressured Trump from the other side and convinced him this was the

wrong thing to do. We should go to Oman and do diplomacy. Now I noticed hours after this story came out, I went to Jewish Insider and I noticed that they were freaking out. And a long time Israel lobbyist named Michael Makovsky was calling for leakers to be fired and declaring that this was one of the worst leaks ever,

so damaging to Israel. I kind of put two and two together. This is the story that I assume, and I could be proven wrong, just me kind of putting two and two together, that I assume led to not just Dan Caldwell, but two other Pentagon officials being summarily fired over leaks.

I was, I didn't make the connection until I read that you did on, I forget where I read it, one of your sites, probably the Grey Zone, and it makes eminent sense to me, but were you as surprised that I was that Hegseth was outside of restraint. I mean, before you even answer that, here he is boasting to Maria Bartiroma. Chris, cut number nine. He's dead serious that Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon. He's said that for 20 years. He's been consistent. That is clear. But he's also dead serious that if we can't figure this out at the negotiating table, then there are other options to include my department to ensure that Iran never has a nuclear bomb.

We hope we never get there. We really do, Maria. But what we're doing with the Houthis and what we're doing in the region, we've shown a capability to go far, to go deep, and to go big. And again, we don't want to do that. But if we have to, we will to prevent the nuclear bomb in Iran's hands. So if Iran doesn't negotiate, my department will get involved. I guess there's two Pete Hegsats, the one that appeared before Maria Bartiromo and the one that is furious that his advice to the president got out. But were you surprised that he was one of those Were you surprised that he was one of those advocating restraint, giving them a macho public image that he conveys of himself?

Well, he's been proven to certainly be a warmonger who's primarily a Trump loyalist. That's why he's there. It's not very credentialed. He'd he's been given this kind of phony war in Yemen that they thought would be a cakewalk, which is failing, which is costing enormous amounts in munitions, stocks, as well as money, and has not achieved freedom of navigation. And in the next week, we could see an actual invasion of Houthi-held Yemen by al-Qaeda fanatics and mercenaries backed by the Gulf states with US air support

because this war has gone so badly. But Heg Seth also is in Iraq war, he's close to the Iraq war experience. We can't call him a chicken hawk. He's close to a lot of the veterans and soldiers who lost limbs and saw that whole experience up close. And so he may actually have listened to some of the restrainers on a war with Iran, a country that can really hit back and has hit back at U.S. assets in the region like the Al-Assad

base in 2018, where hundreds of U.S. soldiers suffered traumatic head injuries from the ballistic missile strike. So he may have been listening to reason and he may be very embarrassed to see his name out there and inflaming the anger of the Israel lobby, which he's courted throughout his career. I think Miriam Adelson threw a fit when she saw this story or heard that it might be coming out and the leakers were flushed out. That's just my theory. They're also two Donald Trump's.

I mean, you say they're two Pete headsets. We don't know which Donald Trump is going to show up every day, but in every case, whether it's, you know, with, with the tariffs, for example, he always. Surrenders to the institutional inertia. He surrendered to the bond market. He's, he's decided to initiate talks. Steve Witkoff had some positive breakthroughs and indirect talks in Oman with the Iranian Foreign Ministry talking about allowing them some measure of uranium enrichment as the JCPOA did, allowing them to have a nuclear program.

What we know from this New York Times article is Netanyahu insisted that the only option was that the US blow up all of Iran's nuclear facilities, including civilian research facilities. And Iran is not going to do that. So Witkoff took a pro-American adult decision at Oman, And then the Likud lobby went crazy. I mean, Mark Levin had a meltdown on his show on Hannity. They were all attacking Trump and Witkoff. And then Trump walks it back. And now we see the Treasury Secretary Besant announced secondary sanctions on anyone who imports Iranian oil, mainly targeting China, a declaration that the US will work towards forcing zero exports of

Iranian oil and a reinstitution of the maximum pressure policy. This is as the as Witkoff is heading back into negotiations on Saturday. So which Trump is going to show up here? We're in a situation now where it looks with Trump restarting negotiations, Iran has the rare opportunity to possibly get a deal, something it didn't have under Biden who just wanted to keep the status quo, status quo Joe going, or a war. And there's, it doesn't look like there will be any middle ground to return to the status quo after these high stakes

negotiations began. And we don't, we don't know which way it'll go. No one does. I wonder if Pete Hegseth has seen this. We're going to run this clip for you. It's another podcast, Colonel Daniel Davis, and the guest is a regular on this show whom you know, Colonel Douglas MacGregor. Watch this, cut number 15. What nation on the planet can have their embassy destroyed in another country and to have an assassination in their capital city on an

inauguration and not go to war with somebody, yet that's exactly what Iran didn't do because they don't have the power to do it. So that should tell you. Wait a minute, wait a minute. That's a fundamentally false statement. Which part? False, false, false. They don't have the power to go to war. You haven't looked carefully at Iran. Iran's arsenal of missiles is enormous. It could flatten Israel in a day. They have the power to go to war. They have chosen repeatedly to avoid war. And I've said this a thousand times. No one in the Middle East is interested in a war except Israel and the United

States. I wonder if Hegseth understands that. Well, someone understands it because another THAAD system was just sent to Israel. This is one of the most expensive weapons platforms in the U.S. arsenal, aside from the F-35. It's an anti-aircraft device that was just sent to Israel. Currently, 30% of the entire US THAAD arsenal has been committed to defending Israel against a potential Iranian strike.

Just to highlight how much of a burden Israel is on US national security and how much of a gulf there is between American interests and Israeli interests. And they've got the US on the verge of attacking Iran after Iran was attacked by Israel and Iran opted to not respond because it hoped under the reformist president Mahmoud Pesachian to get some kind of a deal under Trump. And now look at look at where Iran has been placed. Syria has been destroyed, which was an Iranian ally. Hezbollah may fold back into the Lebanese military

after having its leadership assassinated by Israel, another Iranian ally weakened. Yemen on the verge of being invaded, another Iranian ally besieged, and now Iran is on the precipice of being attacked again by the Zionist axis of Israel and its American proxy. What will Iran has to respond this time? It has to respond with force. It has to do serious damage.

It has to damage the world economy, or it loses all strategic deterrence, it loses all strategic depth, and it faces existential collapse and regime change. And that's where Israel wants to get it. And all it takes is Trump foolishly pulling the trigger. That would mean that after reducing the value of the dollar by 11% in one week through his botched tariff war on the world, Donald Trump will tank the global

economy by initiating war with Iran. From an economic standpoint alone, it's apocalyptic. Who is Daniel Shapiro? Great question. Daniel Shapiro is like so many, or I should say almost all, US ambassadors to Israel. We don't know which country he represents. I always call them reciprocal ambassadors. You look at the current ambassador, Mike Huckabee, his blueprint for Israel-Palestine is the Bible. He says

Palestinians don't exist. There is no occupation of the West Bank. It belongs to Jews because you know what, me and Woody Allen and Steve Witkoff, we are directly connected to the Israelites of the Bible. And if you believe that, you also believe Gale King went to outer space. That's Mike Huckabee. Then you have David Friedman, who is a literal settler, a literal settler who supports a settlement. He's on the board of a settlement, Baytel in the occupied West Bank.

Before him you had, I think you had Tom Nides, and then before that, Daniel B Shapiro. Daniel B Shapiro after his term as Obama's ambassador to Israel, stayed in Israel and raised his children speaking Hebrew, going to Israeli schools in Israel. He didn't wanna come back to the US because- Is this him Max? Oh, one second.

That's him, that's Daniel B. Shapiro currently at the Atlantic Council, which is NATO's unofficial think tank in Washington, supported by pro-Israel and Gulf interests, as well as the arms industry, basically just a money washing operation for the war state. But he also lobbied for the NSO group at Tony Blinken's West Exec Advisors. The NSO group is an Israeli spying firm that has used its Pegasus technology to spy on thousands of human rights defenders, journalists, activists around the world. Daniel B. Shapiro, I think the reason you're asking me about him is he has emerged as one of the leading proponents as a Democrat of Donald Trump striking Iran.

And it's, there's actually a lot of inertia coming from the democratic side against an Iran deal. They do not want Donald Trump to get the diplomatic win. It would embarrass Joe Biden. And they only want a Democrat to be able to do that. Phil Gordon is another one who is Phil Gordon. He was Kamala Harris's top foreign policy advisor. He was advising her on foreign policy when she was vice president and was her

top advisor when she was running for president. And he has denounced Trump and called it foolish for Trump to go to these negotiations at all. It's so obviously petty and partisan, but from Shapiro's point of view, he is just advancing the Israeli perspective as a U.S. official. And that's just something we have to recognize is that the State Department and Pentagon is honeycombed with what I would call Pollardites after Jonathan Pollard, the Israeli spy who was sent back to Israel after he was released from a life term in US prison on the private jet of Donald Trump's

largest donor, Sheldon and Miriam Adelson. These are people who advance Israeli interests first while operating as US national security officials and they're burrowing from within and it's not anti-Semitic to say that because this is just a reality we have to face. It's a reality that I helped expose when I released leaked audio from APAC's most recent meeting this February in Washington, where the top Middle East official as a civilian in the Pentagon, Dana Strahl, was appearing as an Israel lobbyist at this conference and her presence was not even announced there.

Last question, Bernie Sanders, is he making headway in his national tour or is he not very credible? Oh, I mean, something's going on out there. The crowds are enormous. Yeah. I mean, what does this say? I feel the same thing that people in those crowds feel just on a visceral emotional level

about where we're going as a country. The people there feel abandoned by the Democratic Party leadership, not just Kamala and Joe, who suddenly like spoken through Twitter, you're starting to hear from Joe Biden again, Schumer, Hakeem Jeffries, and what do they all have in common? I mean, aside from being controlled by Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and being completely clueless to the suffering, the economic suffering of the average American. They're also warmongering ultra Zionists.

And so Bernie, who himself was a liberal Zionist throughout much of his career, is now condemning Netanyahu in every speech possible and saying there should be an arms embargo on Netanyahu. He'll never say Israel. He wants to make it out to be Netanyahu to be some kind of bad apple. And he's followed by AOC, who has not exactly been on the forefront of challenging the genocide in Gaza,

but they're being pushed by this grassroots surge. And it's a grassroots surge in places like Idaho, in red states, where they're getting these stadium audiences. And so I pointed out that a group of protesters appeared at Bernie's recent speech in Idaho with AOC. They held out a Palestinian flag on one of the rafters and they were roughed up. I wouldn't say roughed up,

but they were swiftly removed and their flag was taken away by police. And Bernie Sanders then made some statement about Netanyahu being a bad guy, but Israel having the right to defend itself against terrorism, whatever that means. But if you look closely at the footage that was filmed near these protesters, first people started to boo them because they thought they were Trumpers or something. Some people who hated Bernie. Then they realized they were Palestine solidarity protesters and the entire crowd,

literally the entire crowd started chanting free Palestine. And so what's happening out there is there's this grassroot surge of people who want to shut down the special relationship which is seeing children burned alive every day in their tents in the ruins of Gaza City. A Pew poll shows for the first time most Americans have a negative view of Israel, including most Republicans under age 45 and just far and away, a wild majority of young supporters of the Democratic Party.

And what Bernie and AOC are doing right now is they're sheep dogging all of them back into the Democratic Party. They're serving as a corral or gatekeepers. And in 2028, they're all going to be asked to vote for President Gavin Newsom and Vice President Josh Shapiro. Right. This is an enormous rally of 20,000 people in Iowa. I don't know why they're yanking these people out.

They're pro-Palestinian demonstrators at bernie's rally but they had to well so now they you can hear the crowd chanting free palestine yeah thousands of people start chanting yeah this is the heartland right right well hopefully this will register appropriately at the ballot box who knows but thank you. Thank you for all of this. These stories are touching, but the viewing public needs to know about them. You do such a tremendous service by exposing all this. Thank you, my dear friend. So do you, Judge. Thank you. Have a great holiday weekend. We'll see you next week. My best to your family. You too, Judge. Good seeing you. Thank you. Some of this stuff is tough to watch.

Max is a great human being whose knowledge of these things is simply encyclopedic. Coming up at two o'clock today, Colonel, on all of this, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson. And at three o'clock today, the always worth waiting for Professor John Mearsheimer, Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom. you