Judging Freedom - Max Blumenthal : The CIA’s Cocaine Business and Regime Change

Episode Date: November 20, 2025

Max Blumenthal : The CIA’s Cocaine Business and Regime ChangeSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Thank you. Thank you. Hi, everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Thursday, November 20th, 2025. My dear friend, Max Blumenthal, joins us now. Max, a pleasure. Thank you very much for your time and for accommodating my schedule. But let's start with this unrecognized and to me bizarre.

You can probably shed some light on it meeting back in July between Jonathan Pollard and Mike Huckabee, Huckabee is, of course, the Zionist U.S. ambassador to Israel. Pollard is the notorious theft of American national security secrets. Is Pollard a hero to the Israelis? Well, he is, and he's a settler who is sort of a local celebrity. Among the religious nationalist world, I remember there's this bookstore I used to walk by, in central Jerusalem where a lot of settlers would frequent when they came into Jerusalem to go shopping and so on to buy frozen yogurt. And it had a giant picture of Jonathan Pollard over the front door

because at that time he was considered cause celeb to the religious nationalist movement and kind of a political prisoner in Israel. And that was the main bookstore where settlers could get messianic texts and so forth. So he's a huge, to a certain constituency in Israel. And through the Adelson Bribery Network, Miriam and Sheldon Adelson, Donald Trump was basically paid to release him. He was sentenced to life in prison. Jonathan Pollard was sentenced to life in prison for some of the most damaging intelligence thefts in U.S. history. He was a naval intelligence analyst. He did this for ideological reasons because he believed he was an Israel firster. And he handed over the methods

that the NSA used to collect intelligence to the Mossad, as well as a list of thousands of intelligence contacts, collaborators, undercover spies, the knock list that U.S. intelligence used to Tel Aviv. He did this in exchange for money, but for ideological reasons. Ultimately, Donald Trump released him, and Sheldon Adelson flew him back to Israel on his personal jet, where he is now sort of a hero. And for some reason, Mike Huckabee, last July, what I call the Israeli-U.S. reciprocal ambassador decided to meet with Jonathan Pollard in his office. And this came as news to me, but it also came as news to the White House and to the CIA.

None of them knew about this. And this should be a fireable offense, considering what Pollard did to the United States. I mean, this is Aldrich Ames-level spying. This is treachery. He is a traitor. What was Huckabee doing with him? No U.S. ambassador has previously met with him. But it does appear that Huckabee has ideological kinship with Jonathan Pollard.

Huckabee is a Pallardite. And if Huckabee isn't fired for him. this, we have to ask in what world, in what political movement, in what White House does he not get fired? It's one that believes in Miga, making Israel great again. Well, it wasn't on his schedule, and the press knew nothing about it. I didn't know about it until you told us a little while ago, and then I looked it up, and it just came out, I guess, in the past few days. So Huckabee must have known he needed to keep this secret from the CIA, from other embassy employees, and from the White House.

I bet he didn't keep it secret from Benjamin Netanyahu. Well, he didn't keep it secret from other figures in the Trump administration because they went, it looks like they went to the New York Times. Three current senior officials confirmed this to the New York Times. So it looks like this is an internal problem. And it's something that I've been seeing from inside the Trump administration. There are still forces in the Trump administration that are, deeply uncomfortable with the personnel and control of the policy because they consider themselves to be

Israel firsters or as one Trump administration source called them to me Mossad's stenographers. You know, Mike Huckabee, and I know him well, Max, because he was full-time at Fox for about two or three years during the much longer time that I was there. But I didn't know now what I now know about him. He is what Tucker Carlson is being. excoriated for condemning a Christian nationalist who puts Israel above the United States, an arch Zionist. Now, I don't know how a human being nominated by the president, confirmed by the Senate, the official government representative of another country, can put that other country first and expect to get away with it.

Well, all the other previous U.S. ambassadors that I can think of were Israel firsters, even under Joe Biden, Tom Nides, for example. I mean, after October 7th, he went and lobbied on behalf of the Jewish federations for more money to support Israel during its genocide. Before that, under Obama, Daniel Shapiro, he stayed in Israel with his family when his term ended and went on to lobby for the NSO group, which produces Pegasus spyware. You had David Friedman from the first Trump ambassador to Israel.

This is a figure who has a part-time residence, I think, in the settlement of Betel, as part of the friends of Betel raises money for the illegal settlements from the U.S. is a complete Israel fester. I mean, he doesn't, he wakes up in the morning, maybe eats some cereal, and then lobbies for Israel. That's what he does with his life. But what Huckabee has done here is an act of just such naked trees. or to associate and welcome and as someone who betrayed the United States at such a high level

that I don't understand how Trump can protect him anymore unless Trump is that fully invested himself in the Israel First program or that this would be just too embarrassing for him. It's really, Trump, at this point, he has to choose between Adelson and the CIA. How does Trump, how does Huckabee explain this to the White House now, which he must have done by now since the time, New York Times piece appeared. It was like Pollard was like crashing some party or he broke in somehow. I don't know, I don't understand what the excuse would be. Let's talk about another Israel fester who happens to be the United States ambassador to the UN.

Why were Danny Dannen, that thug that is the Israeli ambassador to the UN, Mike Walsz embracing each other on the floor of the Security Council earlier this week. Yeah, a really tragic moment in the history of the UN as the Gaza Master Plan passed. And this is a plan to essentially internationalize the occupation of Gaza and a Trojan horse for permanent Israeli control. and a colonial program that I can explain in a little bit more detail in a minute, but which was approved, voted for by the one Arab state on the Security Council in a non-permanent role, Algeria, and the one Muslim state in a non-permanent role, Pakistan, two countries that had feigned concern for Gaza for the last two years. And then behind them, you have

Turkey, Turkia, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Egypt, you know, the so-called the Arabs and the Muslim states that are vying for a role as part of this international stabilization force, which is really a pacification force whose mission will be to disarm Palestinian resistance factions and put Palestinians at the mercy of the Israeli army, but behind an international flag. Now, Turkey has said that disarming Hamas without ending the occupation would be a red line. So why do they want to be involved in this? Have they spoken out against this resolution?

Now you have the two permanent members that would normally veto such a thing, Russia and China. They both abstained. Russia's abstention, I think, will be as consequential, if not more than its abstention on the vote to declare Libya, no-fly zone, which was part of what convinced Putin to run for president again, because that was during the time of Medvedev. What explains the Russian and Chinese votes, given that they harshly condemned the resolution and offered the same analysis that I just did,

that it's a Trojan horse for reoccupation, that it will violate international law and so forth, they claim that they couldn't abstain, they couldn't actually veto it when you have all of the Arab states, which are basically vassals, being in favor of this international force. And after they vetoed it, you have the Palestinian authority, the Vichy authority that collaborates with Israel to rule the West Bank supporting this vote. So what you've seen is the complete betrayal of Gaza by the Arab and Muslim world and Russia and China failing to step in

because I guess they don't want to complicate their relations with Turkey and Egypt and all these other mid-level powers. And Gaza is now at the mercy of what Jared Kushner called the master plan, which I can explain, but which is essentially a colonial divide and conquer plan that continues the genocide under international cover. And will this master plan permit Jared Kushner to become the development for the

very valuable waterfront real estate. I should actually clarify, it was Steve Whitkoff, who referred to it as a master plan in a 60 minutes interview, and Jared Kushner was seated beside him, and he grimaced with so much agony because Whitkoff had let the cat out of the bag. Didn't the vice president let the cat out of the bag in a similar environment where he referred to Kushner as the investor? Yeah. I mean, Kushner is the investor in a company that has

proposed Gaza seafront real estate. Kushner has himself referred to Gaza as ideal waterfront real estate property. So absolutely, Kushner is interested in the master plan. If you look at the map right now, there's this yellow line that Israel is set up, preventing Palestinians from reaching the arable areas that used to be agricultural land. It cuts them off from everywhere east of Gaza City all the way down to east of Han Yunus. Rafah is completely destroyed in the south, so there's this giant buffer, and Israel's occupying that as well as the Netserim corridor.

And that yellow line confines the population of Gaza into basically a concentration camp, where Israel and the United States military through its new civil military coordination center in the Israeli city of Curiat Ghat control all the access points for aid. They're dumping cell phones into Gaza today. There are images of tons of cell phones being offloaded into Gaza for obvious reasons, spying and spreading destabilization. Then what Israel's going to do is in those areas where they're carrying out demolitions, where Palestinians are not allowed to go, where they're being killed if they go. Outside the yellow line, which is 58% of the Gaza Strip, They're going to create these so-called model cities.

We've seen the maps for them in the Boston Consulting Group plans. And they're really like gated communities where everything will be digitized. Like the nightmare that everyone who opposed the COVID lockdowns had of 20-minute cities and globalist control, it will be fulfilled there. Everyone will be living in these biometric gated communities. Businesses will be blacklisted that do not comply with Israel. Israel and those that are white-listed will be run by future warlords. And the United Arab Emirates will be one of the Arab authorities administering things financially.

But cash will be virtually, this will be sort of a cashless society. Everything will be digitized and tokenized biometric. Everyone will be under mass surveillance. And then anyone who remains back in the areas that were controlled by resistance factions, Palestinian grassroots factions, they will be subjected to more starvation sieges and continuous bombardment unless they move to the model areas. That's the future of the master plan until they get those areas on the waterfront for Jared Kushner and his buddies.

I wonder who will build the digital infrastructure, probably the same people that threw you out, Palantir, probably the same people that threw you out of that conference where you tried to question them. But Palantir has been heavily involved by the admission of its CEO, Alex Karp, who was just at the U.S.-S.-Saudi investment forum at the Kennedy Center down the street. Two days ago, Alex Karp has boasted about his role in providing Israel with targeting assistance through Palantir's Maven system and participating openly in the genocide. In the Boston Consulting Group plans for the so-called master plan, various multinational

corporations, tech corporations were put forward for contracts, Oracle, Amazon, Palantir, being just among a few of those that control our media in the United States and our administration. Well, I want to get to Venezuela and the CIA's cocaine business with you, because you've just done some extraordinary reporting on it. But before we do, I'd like you to watch this clip from John Kariako. Full disclosure, John's a friend of mine. John is a former CIA agent. He is the only person who went to jail over the Bush-Cheney torture regime.

And, of course, he went to jail jail because he revealed the identity of the torturers, not because he participated in it, which, of course, he condemned. But what he is saying here to a podcaster whose name I don't know, you'll probably recognize him, one of these young, wildly popular podcasters, is truly extraordinary about why the United States bombed Iran at the behest of Benjamin Netanyahu. Chris, number three. The reason, though, I'm told that Donald Trump decided to bomb Iran was that the Israelis said, for the first time, if you don't. don't bomb Iran to take out these deep bunkers, we're going to use nuclear weapons. And they had never threatened that before. And so Trump said, bombing Iran might actually save us from the start of World War III if it keeps the Israelis from using nuclear weapons. So according to your source,

the Israelis told the President of the United States that if he did not use the United States military power to bomb the nuclear facilities in Iran, Israel, acting on its own, would use nuclear weapons. Yeah. Do you see why there's a problem with that statement, John? Yeah. Because they've never admitted that they've had them. That's right. So you're telling me that they just admitted to the president of the United States that they have

nuclear weapons and we still do not have them in the IAEA treaty. I mean, if Israeli nuclear whistleblowers are to be believed, yeah, they've had them, they started working on them in the 50s, they got them around the late 60s. or the early 70s. Look at, look at Mordecai Vanunu. You know, he wasn't charged for treason for nothing. Is this credible, Max? It is. We're talking about everything today. We're talking about cocaine, nukes, spies. That's because of you, you are a wealth of knowledge about all these things. Well, I can't imagine that young podcaster I've never seen before could be more popular than you if you're running the gamut like this.

And yeah, I have to grow my hair a lot longer. I wish I could. And John's looking great, by the way. Yes. I've been following what he's been through. He knows what he's talking about. And he's basing this on not just speculation, but things we know. Jonathan Pollard, remember I mentioned him before the, we talked about him before.

Israeli spy who was in U.S. naval intelligence, who gave an interview fairly recently to a fellow settler on a podcast in Israel. And he said that back in 1973, we were on the ropes. And when he says we, even though he was in the U.S., he's referring to the Israelis, the Egyptians had broken across the Sinai and were marching towards Israel proper. The Syrians were attacking from the north. and they wanted Nixon to resupply them with an emergency airlift to save Israel. And so the Israelis took U.S. officials to an airfield, showed them an A4 jet, packed with nuclear weapons, and said, if you do not authorize the emergency airlift, we will use nuclear weapons. And so Pollard is openly boasting about nuclear blackmail carried out by Israel back in 1973.

That's what John Kiriaku is referring to. That's Israel's ace card. It's what Seymour Hirsch called the Sampson option. And the program was exposed by Mordecai Vanunu, one of the bravest whistleblowers in history who was tortured for decades by Israel for what he did. He was a former worker at the DeMona facility. Wow. Does the CIA traffic in cocaine?

Well, I referred to them in a debate two days ago on Pierce Morgan with the former U.S. Ambassador James Story and a former CIA agent who was sort of made famous by Joe Rogan, Mike Baker. I referred to them as the cocaine import agency. The CIA was directly responsible for creating the so-called cartel of the Sons that is now said to be under the control of Nicholas Maduro was just. named last week by Marco Rubio, a narco-terrorist organization to justify striking Venezuela on land, possibly assassinating its leadership. And it's a completely fake construct that was created by the CIA in the early 90s to ship 22 tons of cocaine into the U.S. Now, why would they do that? They thought that this would allow them to surveil the drug-running networks through the United States identify who's selling the drugs, but they wound up poisoning our society

as Marco Rubio claims. And this is just sort of, this is the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the CIA being involved with cartels, the DEA agent who actually realized that the CIA was involved with the Sinaloa, sorry, the Guadalajara cartel in the 1980s and was using the cash to fund black operations run by Ali North in Central America was named Kiki Camarena. And what happened to him? He was tortured for days, tortured to death by Guadalajara cartel members in the presence of Felix Rodriguez, the notorious CIA agent who back in the early 60s presided over the execution of Che Guevara. This is all pretty well-documented stuff. But then we have figures in U.S. federal prisons like Gennaro Garcia Luna, who was the most powerful law enforcement security

official in Mexico for years under the administrations of Vicente Fox and Felipe Calderon. These are like the two key U.S. allies from the Pan and pre-parties, from the Pan Party in Mexico. And the U.S. knew about this. State Department officials knew that Garcia Luna was colluding with the Sinaloa cartel to ship massive amounts of cocaine and fentanyl into the United States. But they continued to, they turned a blind eye to it because they had this plan married with Calderon and Vicente Fox. They called him the George W. Bush of Mexico. The U.S. loved him. He was like the most pro-U.S. Mexican president. They turned a blind eye to it until it became too late, and now Garcia Luna is in a supermax prison in the U.S. sentenced to life.

I mean, this is like the head of the FBI being involved directly with the cartel. I don't know what Cash Patel's up to, but I don't know if he's gone that far. Wow. Is the CIA plotting a coup in Venezuela? Well, Elliot Abrams seems to think they are because he's, Gargamel has just resurfaced in the, pages of foreign affairs, the publication of the Council on Foreign Relations, the veteran coup plotter who presided over the Elmosote massacre in El Salvador during the dirty wars of the 80s, who oversaw coup plots in the Gaza Strip against Hamas, who presided over previous coups in Venezuela,

all of which failed, and he's now putting forward a plan for a special forces, U.S. Special Forces attack, on Venezuela. So the CIA, I mean, Trump has authorized them to operate in a lethal fashion, essentially overtly in Venezuela. A refinery, petrochemical refinery just exploded yesterday in a key energy producing region of Venezuela. I mean, we can put two and two together, but it's pretty rare if not, it's very rare for a president to announce that the CIA is going to carry out covert activity. It's a sci-op. that Trump is deploying in order to promote fear and instability among the Venezuelan leadership and hopes that there will be mass defections among generals.

But Abrams is now the most senior voice to openly support special forces attacks inside Venezuela. There's another figure named Marshall Billingsley, if you're watching this. Go to his Twitter account if you want to see war-crazed maniacal psychosis in action. He's just tweeting photos of hospitals, high-rise buildings in Caracas, a baseball stadium, fantasizing about U.S. Tomahawk strikes on these structures and essentially claiming that this is where Maduro's bunkers are or the vice president's. But these are political officials of a U.N. recognized government, and he's calling for Israeli-style strikes on hospitals. Marshall Billingsley has worked in administration since the George W. Bush era was testifying in Congress last October was Trump's key guy on sanctions

on Venezuela. So this is not some nobody. And this is, this is where their thinking is going. There's only one person who can stop this crazy train. And it's Donald Trump. And I don't know if he has it in him. He's the engineer of the train. Before we go, take a look at this clip from Elon Musk. You know, people often talk about sort of eliminating poverty and that kind of thing, but really the, how long have they been talking about that? There's lots of talk. There's lots of NGOs sort of trying to do these things, but really not succeeding. And, you know, the evidence speaks to herself. But AI and humanoid robots will actually eliminate poverty. And Tesla won't be the only one that makes them. I think Tesla won't be the only one that makes them.

I think Tesla will pioneer this, but there will be many other companies that make humanoid robots. But there is only basically one way to make everyone wealthy, and that is AI and robotic. What the hell is he talking about? AI and robotics are going to make everybody wealthy and eliminate poverty. You get it? Well, they're going to make everyone unemployed, and then everyone's going to have to live off universal basic income. As the man seated to Elon Musk's left, Jensen Wang, who's the CEO of Invidia, said right after Elon Musk. What Elon Musk is saying makes absolutely no sense. And it shows that

in the world of AI and tech, there is a messianic mentality that is being fueled by massive infusions of cash that is leading to nowhere. They talk about all the energy they need, all the gigawatts they need, but they don't exactly know what they need it for. They don't have a clear budget. Elon Musk has gotten his board of directors to approve a trillion-dollar pay package for himself? Where's the money going to come from? And they're at the Saudi U.S. investment forum at the Kennedy Center, which was a grotesque gallery of corporate looters and Saudi monarchs and their lobbyists and Donald Trump, a real portrait of American governance at a late and decadent stage. And the Saudi public investment fund, which is actually not as flush with cash as we think

it is, has failed on several white elephant projects like Project Neum, which was to align Saudi Arabia's coasts with resorts and high-speed rail and is going absolutely nowhere, has ponied up $600 billion for these AI warlords, these messianic figures, including Elon Musk, who are seeking more and more cash. So they can say that their earnings have gone up, even though they're not actually selling a product that is profitable at this point. Saudi Arabia generates about $1 trillion every year. So it doesn't have $600 billion to give to them. I don't know where the money is going to come from.

This was just the strangest spectacle of financial fantasy. And essentially what we're witnessing is a kind of point. Ponzi scheme in which all of this money is being directed into AI, our money, Saudi money, but it's not coming back. It's not necessarily creating jobs. It's causing consumers to pay more for electricity bills through all these data centers. And it's fueling a bubble, much like the dot-com bubble of the 1990s. And if you look at Nvidia's earnings, I mean, you have all of these investors with short positions on NVIDIA right now. NVIDIA is taking in all this money, but it's not actually generating anything.

It looks like the bubble could burst and do irreparable harm to the U.S. economy. And we're going to go back and look at that scene there of Elon Musk predicting the end of poverty and gather up our pitchforks. You mean Donald Trump's sons will not get to build Trump towers in Saudi Arabia? I don't know what they're building, but they're, I mean, props to Eric Trump and his crypto business, which has taken in a billion dollars of completely opaque bribes for the Trump family from often foreign governments and foreign figures. We'll never know who they are. That was impressive. These people make Bernie Madoff seem like petty ante by comparison.

Max, thank you, my dear friend. Always a pleasure. Thank you. Thanks for your extraordinary knowledge and your sense of humor. All the best to you. Thanks, wow. If we don't see you next week, a great Thanksgiving holiday to you and your beautiful family. Thanks, Judge. Happy holiday. Thank you. Thank you very much. Coming up at 2 o'clock today, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, at 3 o'clock, Professor John Mearsheimer, at 4 o'clock from Moscow or somewhere in Russia. Pepe Escobar, Judge Napolitano for judging freedom. Thank you.