Judging Freedom - Phil Giraldi: DoJ and Free Speech.

Episode Date: April 2, 2025

Phil Giraldi: DoJ and Free Speech.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 Wednesday, April 2nd, 2025. Phil Giraldi joins us now. Phil, I want to first of all thank you for being with us of course. I want to prevail upon your lifelong career expertise in the intelligence community to ask questions about recent events and then of course I want to talk about your your piece. It's dreadful, not dreadfully written, It's beautifully written. It recounts dreadful events of the suppression of free speech in America. But on your intelligence expertise, were you impressed at all after reading the transcript

of the signal texts involving Pete Hegg, Seth, and Mike Walz and the others, at the general ignorance of the people on the phone about what Hegseth was talking about, well, not phone, on the texting about what Hegseth was talking about, the ignorance of the magnitude of American attacks on Yemen's civilians?

Well, you know, it's kind of interesting. It was interesting to read. And then it was even more interesting to sort of sit back and think about it. And then go back and take another look at it, what I did. My impression was that this was a group of profoundly ignorant people in terms of the target they were talking about Yemen and in general the recent history of that part of the Middle East and what's been going on for 75 years since the end of the Second World War. And they didn't have to fall back on that because they didn't know anything about it and they couldn't fall back on it. Now this led me to believe as a former intelligence person who sat in on scores, if not maybe hundreds,

of meetings that had that kind of purpose where we were sharing information and looking at options and stuff like that. I found the whole experience of seeing this thing and imagining what it was like as incredibly frustrating. There surely are people in the intelligence community and in the Pentagon who have excellent background knowledge and could have briefed these people over the key issues that are involved in the conflict there. And that these people not do their work or is it just the people who are involved are so much political animals

that they're not interested in any alternative views. And maybe that's what it really is all about. How sloppy was it that nobody knew that Goldberg was on the line, so to speak? I mean, the espionage statutes, and espionage is defined as the failure to keep protected and secure national secrets that have been trusted to you. The espionage statutes, as you know, you once had a very, very high national security clearance, can be violated by intent or negligence. It's the rare federal criminal statute that the government only has to prove negligence. How rare is it for that kind of negligence to occur? Well, in the first place, if you're using a communication system

that most experts would agree is highly vulnerable to intrusion by outside forces, then you're negligent, aren't you? I mean, if you're discussing what the United States government is going to do in terms of attacking another country, which the United States is not at war with, then this is something that's about the highest level of security that you can get in terms of your potential violation of security codes. So this is truly an awful thing that they were lazy enough, negligent enough to go to that route to be able to sit around and talk with each other and exchange views on a subject

they didn't know anything about. So that's part of it. And I don't think that Jeffrey Goldberg was there by accident or by oversight. I think he was there deliberately and we still don't know quite how that took place how that took place and why it took place. And this is something that may unravel over the next several months, although the story admittedly is kind of died. Well, it has died because the FBI has been directed by the Attorney General not to investigate it. I mean, this is the same event for which some of the very same people who are now running the FBI and the department of justice wanted Hillary Clinton investigated and now they're not even going to investigate how this happened. Mike Waltz told an absurd story to my friend and former colleague, Laura

Ingram, that I never heard this and I've asked the tech people around here, they never heard it either. Somehow because he got close to somebody else, Goldberg's phone number got sucked into, that's Mike Walsh's phrase, his cell phone. I never heard that. But here is Goldberg commenting on the phone number issue. Now Goldberg, just to refresh the memory of everybody watching, is the Atlantic Magazine editor-in-chief who was on this texting chat for two days and then decided, I better tell them that I'm

here. They obviously don't know I'm here anyway. Cut number six, Chris. This isn't the matrix. Phone numbers don't just get sucked into other phones. I don't know what he's talking about. My phone number was in his phone because my phone number is in his phone. He's telling everyone that he's never met me or spoken to me. That's simply not true. So as Walt's not a derose, but is Waltz lying when he says he doesn't know Jeff Goldberg and doesn't know how the number got there? I don't know. You raise an interesting point. I'm sorry for the multiple questions. I'll unleash you to respond in the moment. Was Waltz trying to use Goldberg as Dick Cheney did, a liberal publication to

advance a neocon view? That seems to me to be the likeliest story that rings of possibly being the truth. Yeah, clearly a lot of these, the people gathered in this conversation were probably one of the biggest collections of neocons and war hawks that one would be able to find anywhere. So they to a certain extent are seeing all this stuff on the same page stuff on the same page and in the same context. And it could quite be that Waltz is basically looking for some kind of escalation of what is going on, which would be Iran. And that certainly he would consider Goldberg to be on his side. And he might have considered that Goldberg could maybe pull some strings to get some kind of story out that would escalate the situation. I think you're right. I think you're right. And then Mike was embarrassed because I guess maybe

he didn't realize Trump hates Goldberg, Hegseth hates Goldberg, Carlin Leavitt, the White House attack dog hates Goldberg. And now it turns out that Goldberg is the friend of the director of national security. I also thought it was interesting what the vice president said. Does the president understand the ramifications of this? One wonders, did the president of the United States even know they were having this conversation?

Well, that's, of course, the big unresolved issue. Nobody's been really talking about that. If the president had been, Donald Trump had been briefed on this situation and what the intentions were, somebody just might have said it, you know, said, look, he knows what we were talking about, and he approved of it. So maybe there's a deeper story here. Again, are they doing an end run to try to create a certain policy or a certain direction? I just don't know at this point. The whole thing smells. There's no question about it. Here's Goldberg's opinion on whether or not these people are even serious players, not

withstanding the jobs they have. Cut number five. I wish that I had not been put in the position to have to release the more sensitive texts. But the only reason I did that was because they said we were lying about what we had and they were trying to cover up what was obviously a massive national security breach. Journalists, I hope operate in the public interest. The public needs to know that they don't take national security seriously. It's very damning and I would suggest very credible. They don't take national security very seriously. Well, there's a certain attitude that's developed.

I think the last time we talked I said it seemed to me that there's been a big shift in the government ever since 9-11, using 9-11 as the excuse. And basically, we've had a series of presidents and their staffs that think they've been anointed by God. And what they say and what they want to do is something that must be done and must be said just because they're saying it. And this is particularly the case with our current incumbent, who believes that Congress and the Supreme Court and in fact lower courts too, basically are not there to in any way inhibit his freedom of doing whatever the hell he wants. You know, I wonder if one of the reasons that the attorney general prohibited an investigation in this is because it might have turned up the fact that Trump didn't know what the hell was going on, didn't know anything about it.

Yeah, sure. That would have been humiliating to him if these people, even though one of them is the vice president, the other is the secretary of defense, decided to kill human beings in a military fashion and the president didn't order it. Yeah, this is a straight out war. It's a war crime. And the fact is that if the fact is that the president didn't know about it, either because someone didn't want him to know about it or because he wasn't interested. This is this would be a first rate story, I would think.

What is the bubble you have written about a a bubble as some sort of a phrase or some secure location? What is that? Let me wait for this phone call to disappear. A bubble is a secure chamber. It's generally made out of plastic and has multiple walls that have signals going through them to impede any kind of attempt to have a foreign intelligence service or a police service to try to overhear

what is being discussed in that room. It's a complete- Well, does the Defense Department have a bubble? Does the Department of National Intelligence have a bubble? Does the Department of National Intelligence have a bubble? It must. Yeah, they all do. And every embassy has one.

And they're a standard issue. And my only question would be to what extent is it possible to link bubbles and have a conversation that goes off in a number of places and is secure to operate that way? That's something, in my time, we didn't have anything that advanced. Okay. Why have we been bombing Yemen since 2002? Well, we've been bombing Yemen because, first of all, because they're Arabs and the Israelis

want an Arab-free area and we've been obliging them. But we've been bombing them specifically because we claim that they are allies of Iran. We also claim that more recently they have been interceding in the massacre of the Palestinians in Gaza by attacking Israeli shipping to try to deter the Israelis from continuing to kill Palestinians. So there are a number of things floating out there, but the Yemenis would, a small country, very poor. They're a prime target for the United States and Israel for all the usual reasons, which are not good reasons.

Can Pete, Heg, Seth be taken seriously? Can Pete Hegseth be taken seriously? Depends on what level you want to take him seriously. As I'm sorry, as the Secretary of Defense of the United States. No, I have I'm beginning to think that there is no one in the in the current cabinet that can be taken very seriously. It's their comments particularly about what is going on in the Middle East and what is going on with Russia are all kind of non-compassmentists. Again, we're back at the issue of how seriously do they take their jobs? Do they really make any attempt to understand what is going on in all these places and understand

maybe in a way that would avoid war instead of killing more people? That's what I am really, I would like to hear more of. Yeah. and really I would like to hear more of, senior officials in the US government, finally thinking in terms of not killing people and trying to bring people together in some kind of rational way. Well, if you listen to Pete, now I've known him for 10 or 12 years,

we worked together for a long time at Fox. He is interested in, he loves this word, it's an odd word, but it's a legitimate English word, lethality. He's interested in killing rather than in preventing killing. I would imagine if Donald Trump had said that Jim Mattis, I want you to bomb Imagine if Donald Trump had said that Jim Mattis, I want you to bomb Sana, he might say well you got to consider the consequences. If he said to Pete Hegseth, I want you to bomb Sana, Pete would say when? How soon? That's the difference.

No, actually I think we say where is Sana? He might say that. Let me get to your recent dreadful piece, not dreadfully written, but describes dreadful events about arrests in the United States of America of people legally here because of their speech. And let me suggest to you, I know this is going to irritate you, but I love you, you know that. Let me suggest to you that this is the root cause for these arrests. Chris, cut number 11. These ignorant demonstrators, who are they demonstrating for, for these murderers, these rapists, these mass killers?

This is a reflection of a deep rot that has pervaded the intellectual hub of free societies. And this vilification of Israel, the Jewish people, and Western values has been propagated by a systemic alliance between the ultra-progressive left and radical Islam. the ultra-progressive left and radical Islam. It must be resolutely fought by civilized societies to safeguard their future. This is why we must all commend President Trump's decisive actions against antisemitism. And we must pressure other governments to do the same.

Check that last phrase. We must pressure other governments to do the same. Check that last phrase. We must pressure other governments to do the same. Well, we've succeeded in pressuring the United States, now we have to pressure other governments. This monster is a crusader against the freedom of speech. Well, he's also a crusader against the truth because you're describing Well, he's also a crusader against the truth because he's describing an entity that is full of killers, rapists, and so on and so forth. He's describing his own country under his rule. And he's convinced the United States to do the same.

And he wants the United States to go on a crusade, may I use that term, to convince the rest of the world that lining up behind Israel to kill every Muslim, I find that interesting that he frames the enemy here as Muslims, you know, and he then flips the coin and says, gee, some people have been saying naughty things about Jews. Well, I would recommend that Mr. Prime Minister recognize the fact that people like me, who are very much opposed to the Gaza genocide, are the reasons why anti-semitism is growing. It's because of what Mr. Netanyahu and his colleagues have been doing to the

rest of the world. And so if people say, oh wow, this is the Jewish state and this is what they do, I can see how that logic kind of follows onto each other. But this is a, this man is, as you say, a monster, a monster of depravity, also not much love by his own people because he's a crook. So here we have Benjamin Netanyahu telling us what to do. Oh my god.

Well, as if to make things worse, here's David Friedman. Now Mr. Friedman was the United States ambassador to Israel in Trump's first term. He's a longtime New York City friend of Donald Trump's. He is now the leading candidate to be nominated to the, you ready for this? The United States ambassador to the United Nations. Yeah. Here's Mr. Friedman on, we can deport them. We can put them in jail. We can make their lives miserable for speech, number 10. A government can do in two months more than any organization could do in its lifetime.

And so when we talk about the importance of a bipartisan fight against antisemitism, which of course I endorse, and I, as my predecessor said, I condemn antisemitism on the right and on the left. I'm an equal opportunity condemner of anti-Semitism. You're alluding to Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson. Yeah, none of them are any good on the right, on the left.

I don't like any of these anti-Semites and I'm not shy about it. But the government, a government, the United States government or the government of France or the government of any other country has the power to rein in anti-Semitism in a much more effective way. And people say, well, the governments are not in the business of changing the way people think. That's true. But to my thinking, most people who are anti-Semites, most of these people running around, we're not gonna win their hearts and minds because they don't have hearts and they don't have minds.

So, how are we gonna, there's no reason to think we're ever gonna convince them, but we can deport them, we can put them in jail, we can make their lives miserable, we can cut off their funding, and that's what the Trump administration is doing for the first time. So the Trump administration of which this man was once apart and yearns to be apart again is in the business of evaluating speech and punishing the speech. It hates and fears or its benefactors like Mr. Friedman hate and fear.

We have to recall that David Friedman was the clown who was running around under Donald Trump in his first administration and was giving the Israelis everything they wanted, including a green light for them to basically expel the Palestinians who have been living in that country for 2,000 years completely out of their homes and completely out of the area. That was David Friedman. Right. Well, he may be back, Phil, which of course will be more for us to comment on and write about, but horrific for the reputation and representation of the United States at the UN. Thank you for your time, Phil. Always a pleasure no matter what we're talking about. It's always great to chat with you and to be able to pick your brain. We'll see you again soon.

Thank you very much. I look forward to it. Likewise. And remaining today, the one and the only Max Blumenthal right here at 415 Eastern this afternoon, Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom. You