Judging Freedom - Phil Giraldi : How Dangerous Is the CIA?

Episode Date: January 28, 2026

Phil Giraldi : How Dangerous Is the CIA?See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Undeclared wars are commonplace. Pragically, our government engages in preemptive war, otherwise known as aggression with no complaints from the American people. Sadly, we have become accustomed to living with the illegitimate use of force by government. To develop a truly free society, the issue of initiating force must be understood and rejected. What if sometimes to love your country you had to alter or abolish the government? Jefferson was right? What if that government is best which governs least? What if it is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong? What if it is better to perish fighting for freedom than to live

as a slave? What if freedom's greatest hour of danger is now? Hi, everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for judging freedom. Today is Wednesday, January 28, 2006, Phil Geraldi joins us now. I want to ask you some questions about the CIA. We have an interesting clip on the invasion in Venezuela between Senator Rand Paul and Secretary of State Rubio. But before we get there, let's discuss Minneapolis. Do the federal agents have a mindset which rejects the Constitution? which rejects state and federal law, which rejects right and wrong, which rejects common decency? I don't know if I would go so far as to say a mindset. In fact, when I was in the agency in particular, people could be very, very fastidious about the rules and things like that. But I think that what was starting back then,

which increased with 9-11 and now has become a plague on our house, I would describe it as, is the fact that the policies are driving the intelligence and are driving what the government does and how it does it. And if you have to lie to do that or you have to just do things that don't make any sense, that's all in the day's work. And we're seeing a lot. of that play out on a more practical level in terms of what's going on up in Minneapolis and everything like that. There is a, the justifications are in a manner of speaking intelligence assessments, but there's no intelligence involved in them. These are essentially policy justifications, and if they have to make them up, they're quite capable of doing that. And I used to see that

in terms of, in particular, as I did as I described in my article, in terms of Iran, after the Iranian government basically turned on the U.S. establishment, and they became enemy number one. There was nothing that was too silly or too provocative that we just couldn't go out and do it. Well, but the idea that a lady is blowing a whistle and photographing an ice agent, and he doesn't like it, so he pushes her to the ground, a 37-year-old man comes to help her get up. The ice agent doesn't like that. The 37-year-old man has a phone in his hand. they spray his eyes with pepper spray, which sadly was the last thing he saw on this earth. He goes down.

His jacket moves, and they see he has a gun in the small of his back in a holster. They remove the gun. The guy with the gun, the agent with the gun, runs away. He's the other side of the street when two of the other agents put nine rounds in his back. I mean, this is almost inconceivable that it's defensible. And yet, and yet the White House put out press release. is saying he was there he is there's the image of the first agent shooting him um Alex Pretty the White House said he was an assassin he was there to slaughter agents he brandished the

gun he was a domestic terrorist none of this was true absolutely none the guy was as innocent as the driven snow he came to the defense of a woman, a middle-aged woman that an ice thug pushed to the ground because he didn't want her photographing him. And by the way, photographing the police is absolutely protected under Supreme Court jurisprudence. Yeah, well, see, this is like the whole argument that I would like to make about where we are as a country in terms of these essential, shall we call them, services provided by the government and we're in nowhere's land. We're basically doing things just because we're going through kind of a ritual. It was totally predictable that when this poor guy got killed, there would be an

immediate response from the authorities who were, you know, from the president on down, in terms of making up stories that in the sense are an intelligence response. Oh, yes, we know. And now, of course, stories are coming out today. Oh, they knew about him already because he had been seen photographing a demonstration. And now there is a list that the Department of Homeland Security is maintaining, which is a list of people who do things like observe the the ICE people as they're going around and doing their jobs. So this is horrific. And it's, as I say, this is kind of a thing where I felt,

I felt I wanted to write this article just to say, this is what was going on kind of back with Iran when I was active. We're talking to the 1980s. And this was quite indefensible in a lot of ways then. And in, and something that in no way, could benefit United States foreign policy. But it was something that would eventually wind up in the chopper, and it would come out at the other end

with some concocted tale about the threat coming from countries like Iran and so on and so forth. We've seen this embroidered over and over and over again since that time. Now, you talk about people making lists. Watch this, Chris, the news, president of TikTok. We made a change to designate the use of the term Zionist as a proxy for a protected attribute as hate speech. So if somebody were to use Zionist, of course you can

use it in the sense of you're a proud Zionist. But if you're using it in the context of degrading somebody, calling somebody a Zionist as a dirty name, then that gets designated as hate speech to be moderated against. Over the course of 2024, we tripled the amount of accounts that we were banning for hateful activity. We also have, I think, over two dozen Jewish organizations that are constantly feeding us intelligence and information when they spot violative trends. There is no finish line. There's no finish line to moderating hate speech, identifying hateful trends, trying to keep the platform safe. There's no such thing as an end game.

So is it any wonder that people are leaving TikTok, young people are leaving TikTok in droves? Yeah, and of course the clowns like that individual who just treated us to a bit of his mind, if he has one, is basically telling us that in kind of a maybe more polite fashion that any criticism of Israel and what Israel is doing and of the Zionist state, which is behind it, is not acceptable. So we have a realm of TikTok will have a realm of viewpoints that are acceptable to Israel and to Mr. Presser. And to let's point out that this all happened because Donald Trump went after TikTok and made the case as much as Trump as Trump is capable of making any cases, but made the case that TikTok had to be removed

from Chinese ownership because it was just a bad thing. Well, he was under pressure from the Israel lobby, which is wanting to bring in Mr. Presser and the unit 8200 Israeli censors to make it so that Americans can't see things that are going on in the genocide in Gaza. they can't even hear anybody talk about it. So you can say on TikTok, Zionist if you're praising somebody, but you can't say Zionist if you're critical of them. This is really certain.

Now, look, it's a private entity. They can engage in whatever censorship they want. But this is what happens when the President of the United States and his acolytes in Congress orchestrate the destruction of a popular website and the delivery of it into the hands of an uber Zionist like Larry Ellison, for whom this young man we just heard works. Going back to Minnesota, here's another thug, probably one of the most despicable or more despicable in the Congress, Congressman Randy Fine, I'm sure you know or know of him. You can imagine what he said.

An armed seditionist, he's speaking of Alex Preti, attacked federal law enforcement today as they were rounding up foreign invaders in Minneapolis. The insurrectionist was put down. Well done. I will stand with ICE as they fight these foreign invaders and their treasonous allies. We will not stop until every illegal is deported. This is a Republican member of Congress. He's accusing him of sedition,

Insurrection and Treason All of one short Right, because he came to the aid of a lady That the ice thugs Pushed to the Frozen Ground Because she had the temerity of blowing a whistle at them And filming them Yeah, and as I say

The war against these poor people who were attacked by the authorities and one of them was killed continues. There was a, I don't know if you've noticed that there's a photo floating around talking about the victim, showing him dressed in a woman's dress. Now, this is to, you know, label him as, you know, someone strange and obviously left wing. But the fact is, of course, it's an AI-produced photo. They just took a picture of his head and put it on a picture of a woman's body in an address. And this is the kind of crap they're playing.

And this is on Facebook, which, of course, also has Israel Unit 8200 as its censorship staff. Wow. With all these things that the White House press office put out about Pretti, assassin, murderer, slaughter, domestic terrorist, would you be surprised that the president said he didn't hear of it? Cut number 15. Do you agree with the assessment from some of your own officials that Alex Pretti is a domestic terrorist or an assassin? Well, I haven't heard that, but certainly he shouldn't have been carrying a gun.

But all of, hey, look, bottom line, everybody in this room, we view that as a very unfortunate incident, okay? Everyone, unless you're a stupid person, very, very unfortunate incident. I don't like that he had a gun. I don't like that he had two fully loaded magazines. That's a lot of bad stuff. And despite that, I say that's a very unfortunate. He doesn't understand the first thing about the Second Amendment. I don't like the fact that he had a fully loaded gun.

What good would a gun be if it's not loaded with their ammunition? Yeah. And I love the way that some of these people like Patel are making comments about this. They don't even know how a gun operates. You were talking about two cartridges, two cartridges in the gun at the same time. I'm not even sure what that means. And, you know, it was just the strangest thing. Obviously, they've been briefed up, but they didn't quite get it.

And these people are basically on agenda. They're on agenda all the time. They're not interested in facts. They're not interested in the truth. They're not interested in protecting American citizens. And it's exactly. Except when they want their votes. Here's Trump.

touting his support for the Second Amendment. The question is on crime prevention. Would you be open to expanding the national concealed carry to apply to D.C. like it does in other states like Texas. Well, they have it in some states and they feel shrugly about it. You know, as you know, I'm in favor of it. People have to protect themselves. I'm a Second Amendment person very simply. People have to be able to protect themselves.

Especially like in Washington, you walk down the street, a guy comes up and, you walk down the street. a guy comes up and slugs you, he's got a pistol in his hand. You can be tough, you're going to be in great shape, you can be a powerful person, or you can be a guy that weighs 100 pounds with a gun in your hand. And I'll bet on the guy with a gun 100% of the time, right? And so you need protection. So I'm a Second Amendment person all the way. Yeah, please.

I don't like the fact that he was carrying a gun that was fully loaded, and he had two magazines with him, and it's pretty unusual. absolutely protected under federal law and under Minnesota law. Does the CIA have the attitude that the laws don't restrain it? Well, I think laws restrain them is not quite the right way to put it. I think the way the intelligence services, and I was in, of course, also military intelligence. I think their attitudes are basically that they're something outsized. side of the legal system or the normal restraints on government, because after all, they are

secret intelligence organizations who have their special rules. And I think that's the way it kind of pervades. I spent how many years, 20 plus years in military intelligence and also the CIA. I never carried a gun. But I was in a lot of places where it was presumed that you essentially would try to deal with the local population at a certain level. And, you know, this was a kind of a game in terms of how the government viewed its own personnel and how it kind of used them overseas. And that's kind of the point of some of the stories that I share about, you know, the old days in the government and some of the strange things that tended to happen. When the United States invaded Venezuela to kidnap Nicholas Maduro, did that constitute an act of war, in your view, which should have not have occurred without congressional authority? Yeah, I absolutely agree was an act of war. And I also would agree that Trump's open statements about the fact that he had unleashed the CIA in Venezuela. That is also an act of war. I'm concerned. And I think that somebody should have taken him to task right then, someone being Congress or, you know, even

the media. And this idiot is basically kind of stirring things up and encouraging people to behave outside the rules or outside what most societies, most places would consider to be the rules. And this is what you get in the end. You get dead people. And Trump has more than once said, yeah, we go out and kill them. Watch this conversation, which is, really in quotes. It's not much of a conversation, but watch this back and forth on the issue of war between Senator Rand Paul and Secretary of State Marco Rubio. This is just from just a few hours ago. If a foreign country bombed our air defense missiles, captured and removed our president, and blockaded our country, would that be considered an act of war? Well, I think your question is

about the, and I will acknowledge you've been very consistent on all these points the entire career. So, let me, no matter who the, who's in charge. So I will point to two things. The first is it's hard for us to conceive that an operation that lasted about four and a half hours and was a law enforcement operation to capture someone we don't recognize as a head of state, indicted in the United States, wanted with a $50 million balance. My question would be if it only took four hours to take our president. It's very short.

Nobody dies on the other side. Nobody dies on our side. It's perfect. Would it be an act of war? We just don't believe that this operation comes anywhere, close to the constitutional definition of war. But would it be an act of war if someone did it to us? Nobody dies, few casualties.

They're in and out. Boom, it's a perfect military operation. Would that be an act of war? Of course it would be an act of war. I'm probably the most anti-war person in the Senate, and I would vote to declare war if someone invaded our country and took our president. So I think we need to at least acknowledge this is a one-way argument. one way arguments that don't rebound that you can't apply to yourselves that cannot be universally

applicable are bad arguments what do you think phil oh well rent had it perfectly i mean the thing is it's it's it's in the mind of rubio in the mind of trump uh there's one rule for somebody else and one rule for us. And the one rule for us, and this is verbalized by the president all the time, is that we are the big guy, the big dog in the neighborhood, and we are going to threaten you. And if you don't immediately roll over,

we are going to do something very bad, something terrible to you. And this is no way to run a country. No way do you want to run a country, if you want any other country to respect you. And even by any simple moral code, which I believe many of us have, this is wrong. Phil, thank you very much, my dear friend. Every time we talk, the situation seems to be worse.

Absolutely. Absolutely. I think the country is going down the toilet. And it's being, that is happening because of our poor leadership. And I'm not just speaking about Mr. Trump. We had Joe Biden before this. And we almost had Hillary Clinton, for God's sakes, the first time that Trump was elected. There's just something basically wrong about the people who run for office in this country, the majority of them.

There are some good ones. Mr. Massey would be one. but there are a lot of them that are just time servers in it to make a big paycheck and lots of money afterwards and they don't give a damn about morals or ethics or what they should be doing if they were doing things that were right. Nicely put, Phil. Thank you very much for your time. Stay warm.

The weather is terrible on the East Coast. I don't have to tell you that. And we'll look forward to seeing you again soon. Okay, and Rupert says goodbye. He's in the back there. I hope Rupert keeps you and Angela nice and warm. Thank you. Okay, bye-bye. Bye. Tomorrow at 8 in the morning a new guest, Charmine Narwani, a Lebanese journalist, will be joining us live from Lebanon.

What are the Israelis doing to Syria and Lebanon? At 11 o'clock, Aaron Matae, at 1 o'clock, Colonel Douglas McGregor, at 2 o'clock, Colonel Larry Wilkerson at 3 o'clock, Professor John Mearsheimer. Judge Napolitano for judging freedom.