Judging Freedom - Max Blumenthal: Is Trump Pro-War?

Episode Date: November 20, 2024

Max Blumenthal: Is Trump Pro-War?See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Resolve to earn your degree in the new year in the Bay with WGU. With courses available online 24-7 and monthly start dates, WGU offers maximum flexibility so you can focus on your future. Learn more at wgu.edu. so so Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Wednesday, November 20th, 2024. Max Blumenthal joins us now. Max, a pleasure, my dear friend. Thank you very much for joining us. I have a lot of questions for you about Israel and about Donald Trump and his announced national security cabinet team. But first, let me ask you a few questions about

Ukraine. Why do you think Joe Biden is allowing the use of American personnel to fire long-range missiles into Russia at this stage of the game after nearly all observers have concluded that Ukraine is on its last leg? Well, there are a number of reasons. One, as pro-Biden pundits have stated openly on, I believe it was MSNBC or CNN. I can't remember where I saw it, but they were saying what the rest of us were saying, which is that Biden has done this to prevent Donald Trump from entering office and initiating a land for peace deal. This will plunge Ukraine deeper into the war and drag the United States directly into conflict with Russia as Vladimir Putin has updated his nuclear doctrine to declare the right of Russia to retaliate, including with nuclear weapons against

any nuclear power that backs Ukraine. And that's what's happening right now. And the warning has been right there for months for the Biden administration and Keir Starmer in the UK to see. So why did Biden decide to do this while he was sort of wandering off into the Amazon jungle cluelessly? Was it elder abuse by Tony Blinken because Biden isn't really calling the shots? I don't think so because Biden has been there from the beginning directing project Ukraine, as we all know, firing the prosecutor who was looking into shady Burisma deals in which his son was involved, shepherding through IMF loans. At every step of the way, Biden has been there. So this is sort of, for Biden, the capstone,

or perhaps we could call it the tombstone of his legacy in Ukraine. It's his final act in a disastrous, I don't even want to call it a national project. It's almost like a denationalization project in which he was a singular figure. So there's that. And then there's also the catastrophic situation that Zelensky created in Kursk, where he staged an offensive, a sort of Robert E. Lee style offensive into Russia, into an area that wasn't well defended in order to demonstrate to his sponsors in Washington that the Ukrainian military could still go on the attack and hold territory inside Russia, but also to trap his sponsors and force them to defend him in order to hold on to that territory. Because if Zelensky's pushed out and he's going to be facing at least 50,000 Russian troops,

including North Korean troops who are capable of rotating 100,000 men in and out, then that's the end for Zelensky. This is really his last stand. It's kind of his Gettysburg. So the first strike with an attack on his missile was in Kursk, and it's going to be focused there. And I think the next few months will decide the outcome of the proxy war. Trump has argued that he can end the war in 24 hours. There's no way he can do that. No, there's never any way he could do that. And the Ukrainian government, while Joe Biden was managing the Ukrainian government, like his own Imperial Fiefdom. The Ukrainian government was meddling in American politics. Remember, there were meetings at the Ukrainian embassy with members of the Hillary

Clinton campaign and Ukrainian officials, which led to the dissemination of potentially bogus black ledger showing that Paul Manafort was somehow connected to Russia, leading to Paul Manafort's imprisonment. So this was Donald Trump's campaign manager. So, I mean, Donald Trump is constantly getting kneecapped by the Ukrainians and their sponsors in Washington. And that meant there was never any way he was going to end this in 24 hours. What's happening right now should have been inevitable to everyone in Trump world, and I think we're going to see more like it, more acts of sabotage and subterfuge just like it. Jake Sullivan has announced that President Biden has available to him $7 billion to spend, meaning $7 billion in equipment he ships over there and $7 billion goes to the arms manufacturers to replace what was

shipped out. We all know how this works. I guess they want to spend all of it on an undeclared war. And I guess they want to put a catastrophe in Donald Trump's lap, much as Biden believes Trump put the catastrophe of Afghanistan into Biden's lap. Yet, Tony Blinken made some very revealing comments when he said he will spend all money available between now and Donald Trump's inauguration to continue this war. And that's what Jake Sullivan is doing. There are several billion dollars left, and then Ukraine is going to eventually run out of money. And when it runs out of money, it's also going to be deeply in debt to its real owners at BlackRock, the real owners of Ukraine who will begin to Project Ukraine as an independent Ukrainian entity. So in many ways, we're in praising him now. He was a major sponsor of Ukraine, I mean, too, oppose these massive bills of military and humanitarian aid to Ukraine, paying Ukrainian pensioners and Ukrainian teachers and public employees. That's just not going to be on the Republican agenda. And consider the fact that Americans have paid over $180 billion of their tax money to the most corrupt country in Europe. It's just not popular anymore, even among Democrats.

One would think that by kicking the can down the road, Biden is going to cause this to explode on Trump's watch, and he'll be left with this shell of a country and some way to explain how he inherited it and why he couldn't end it in 24 hours. Switching to Israel, Max, Amos Hochstein, we all know who he is. He's probably an Israeli agent in the American government, but he is nominally in charge of the negotiations with Hezbollah. I thought he had a deal between the Israeli negotiators and the Hezbollah negotiators, and then Netanyahu said no deal. Is Netanyahu playing the same game that he played back when the negotiations were going on with Hamas?

See, I don't understand what's happening right now because Hochstein initially canceled a trip to Lebanon. And whenever he does that and he expresses anger at the Lebanese government for their obstinacy because they're still holding on to some degree of sovereignty, it's followed by horrific Israeli attacks in Beirut. And when he canceled his trip about 96 hours ago, this was followed by an attack in central Beal movement, which is the movement of the parliamentary speaker, Nabi Berry, who Hochstein has to negotiate with on behalf, who negotiates on behalf of Hezbollah because the U.S. refuses to recognize them or negotiate with them directly. Now, Hochstein is saying that there is some promise of a possible truce or some kind of maybe a temporary ceasefire. Things are actually not going that well for Israel, certainly not on the ground in southern Lebanon. And in the last 24 hours, we've seen another drone infiltration into Israeli territory with impacts. There was a ballistic missile impact directly in Tel Aviv.

Haifa, I was speaking to a friend who lives in Haifa the other day. It's under constant attack. He sent me some footage from just outside his apartment window, and it was pretty shocking. The Iron Dome was running nonstop. Missiles were getting, I'm sorry, rockets were getting through, and Tel Aviv could eventually become like Haifa. So Netanyahu's in a tough position. And I think his negotiating position has loosened a little bit since the triumphalist days after the assassination of Nasrallah. So anything's possible here, but I think what we need to understand is the role that Hochstein has played correctly identified by a former un official and whistleblower craig moe kyber as kind of the tom hagen of israel tom hagen was the uh the lawyer to the godfather

the irish lawyer to the godfather right he was the consigliere to Vito Corleone. Actually, I guess he got briefly removed because he wasn't considered a wartime consigliere by Michael Corleone, but Hochstein does seem to be a wartime lawyer for Israel. does is deliver Israel's demands to the Lebanese government under cover of U.S. diplomacy. Then when they refuse, Israel is used as the violent enforcer. They bring in Clemensa in the form of the Israeli army. And what does Israel want here? They're demanding that Lebanon agree to allow them to continue to attack Hezbollah at will anywhere in southern Lebanon, south of the Latani River, and possibly all the way up to Saida, which means that there is no ceasefire and violates UN Resolution 1701 agreed upon in 2006. I mean, that's the main sticking point there is Israel retains the right to operate in Lebanon after a so-called ceasefire. I mean, how could anyone accept that? And Hezbollah is being asked to disarm, and they're just not going to do that. That's the ultimate agenda of Israel. So here we are with just continued escalation, killings in Lebanon. I mean, the killings have

gotten so intense in Lebanon that an Israeli official just said that they'd run out of targets, and that's why they killed the spokesman for Hezbollah's media wing, Mohamed Afif. I mean, I've actually met with his predecessor, Ibrahim Moussaoui, at the office in Dahia. He's received every U.S. journalist who comes in as an interest in reporting on the conflict there. This is not someone who's involved in military decisions at all. Moussaoui now serves in the Lebanese parliament and is a political official. So they're basically killing anyone they can affiliated with Hezbollah and then just bombing random buildings that contain the Shia population. And this is what they're doing to try to create pressure. And all it's doing is actually creating unity around Hezbollah, while Hezbollah continues to demonstrate its ability to hit back hard. I mean, they even hit Netanyahu's own bedroom in Caesarea. Tell me about Netanyahu himself, his chief spokesperson, is still in jail over BB gate.

And he's banned the showing of this movie, The BB Files, in whichanyahu that's familiar to a majority of Israelis who have been protesting since 2018. The protests leading up to on a documentary about the protests against the person that Israelis called the crime minister. And now, you know, the walls are closing in on Netanyahu. They really are because as soon as he leaves office, all of his trials are going to catch up on him. And there have been new corruption scandals just in the past weeks over the BB leaks, where he was leaking forged stories to international media through his staff in order to justify maintaining a troop presence in southern Gaza to prevent a hostage deal. Now we see Netanyahu with another propaganda stunt offering $5 million for every hostage recovered, every captive recovered. And weirdly, if you Google it, Google puts this notice up separate from the news stories as though Google is advertising this bounty, but it really shows the desperation of Netanyahu. He shouldn't need to put up a bounty for the recovery of hostages because a deal is on the table. It's been on the table, agreed to by Hamas since early May. And Hamas's condition, which is

untenable to Netanyahu, is that there be a ceasefire, or at least a long-term ceasefire, with no Israeli troop presence inside Gaza. And even Netanyahu's opposition in the form of Benny Gantz has called for a long-term Israeli troop presence inside Gaza. They've built bases. They've built the Netzerim Corridor. They're trying to ethnically cleanse the north and separate Gaza into three. So for so many reasons, Netanyahu is caught in kind of an endless war, an endless quagmire. And we're only going to see the Israeli public grow more and more angry and disgusted with him as he wields tools of censorship and political machinations just to stay in power. And what the Israeli army is doing inside Gaza right now represents a new level of not just horror, but corruption. What they're doing to prevent the humanitarian aid from getting in is one of the most corrupt acts during this war, because they're actually,

the same way that the CIA and NATO used weaponized proxies inside Syria, who represented some of the most extreme criminal elements in Syrian society, as well as foreign jihadists. That's what Israel's doing inside Gaza. They're using known smugglers who have been drug dealers, running drugs from outside Sinai to loot aid. And then they sell the aid to the merchant class, which then sells it back to the public at an extremely high price, causing mass starvation. And then Israel says, hey, we have nothing to do with the fact that the aid isn't getting in.

This is because of gangs. And the U.S. media refuses to tell the full truth here. But, I mean, we even know the names of the gang leaders like Shadi El-Sofi. These are like wanted murderers, long time collaborators with Israel who have been arrested for drug dealing again and again. And Yasser Abu Shabab is someone who's wanted by the Gaza police who actually has worked with ISIS related groups in the Sinai desert. And then once the aid gets in, the population in northern Gaza is no longer starving and won't need to move south. So the U.S. is on board with this whole agenda. And they're empowering Netanyahu in the process. Here's Netanyahu offering the five million. It's got to be American cash, but here it is. Cut number three. I want to say to those who hold our hostages, whoever dares to harm our hostages, his blood be on his own head. We will chase you and we will get you.

I also say to those who want to get out of this maze, whoever brings us a hostage will find a safe way, he and his family, to get out. We will also give a reward of $5 million for each hostage. You choose. The choice is yours. How realistic is this? I mean, he's basically calling for collaborators. He's promising Palestinians in Gaza $5 million to deliver hostages. How can they physically deliver hostages to Israel and Israeli troops? Unclear. It would obviously be very

dangerous. There are many desperate people who might actually be willing to do that. And there are people who deeply despise Hamas, as we were just discussing, including political rivals. So perhaps this could take place. But we saw what happened when Israel was able to identify the location of hostages. I believe it was in the Nusaret refugee camp earlier this summer. They identified the location of Noah Arghamani, one of the most high-profile hostages taken from the Nova Electronic Music Festival and three others. And they sent in through the ill-fated Biden Gaza aid pier, they sent in a team of what's known as Mistar Avim, Israeli troops disguised as local Palestinians. I guess in this case, they were disguised as humanitarian aid workers. Their trucks were identified. They came under attack and Israel wound up massacring 280 people with 2000 pound bombs in order to clear the way for

the aid convoy to go in and rescue these four hostages. It was a disastrous bloodbath. Netanyahu has no way of getting whoever the remaining hostages are out through bounties, paying collaborators, and these gruesome special forces style operations. So the only way is through a deal, which seems to be politically impossible for him. And we don't know how many of the hostages and captives are even alive. It's said that there are maybe 75, 65, but their families know that their blood is on Netanyahu's hands for rejecting the deal that has always been there or has been there since at least early May. Max Blumenthal, thank you, my dear friend. Much appreciated. I hope we have time to chat next

week. It's a short week, but I hope we have time to chat. Thank you very much for your time today. All the best. Thanks a lot, Judge. Coming up at five o'clock Eastern, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom. Thanks for watching!