Judging Freedom - Phil Giraldi : Trump On a Roll!

Episode Date: December 11, 2025

Phil Giraldi : Trump On a Roll!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Thank you. Hi, everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Thursday, December 11th, 2020. My dear friend, Phil Giraldi, joins us now. Phil, that's always a pleasure, my dear. Man, thank you for accommodating my schedule. You have a fabulous piece at the Unz Review, UNZ Review, for people who want to read it, called Donald Trump on a roll this week.

It's about killing, vengeance, absurd behavior, much of it generated by ego. We'll start with ego and work our way up or down, wherever you want to look at it to the killings. What a hardened intel officers and military veterans think of a president who goes around Washington, D.C., naming things for himself. and who is largely indifferent to the truth. I mean, example, claiming that he has settled these wars that we know are still going on between Thailand and Cambodia and Pakistan and India. We'll start with the naming. Well, the thing is that, you know, the question about how people inside the system

view what is going on, I'm in touch with quite a few retirees, And, you know, you have the people that you talk to on your program. And I think contempt is the best word that comes up when I think about how this stuff goes on. I mean, the naming syndrome is just bizarre as all hell. I mean, we started out with wanting to rename the Kennedy Center after himself and the opera hall at the Kennedy Center after his wife. And then more recently, we've found that the U.S. Institute of Peace, which he earlier this year tried to disband, has now suddenly been revitalized because he had a speaking experience there

for the World Cup coming up in which he was awarded a Peace Medal that the FIFA, the World Cup organization, created for him. And now the Institute has been revitalized, and it's now the Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace. What the hell is it? Oh, well, it's, it was founded, I believe, back, oh, God, I think in the 90s. And the general idea was a place for, for promoting resolution. of conflicts without going to war. And that was the whole idea behind it.

And towards the beginning of Donald Trump's current term, he sent the doge people around to strip it of assets, and they get rid of it, and now all of a sudden it's back. So that's what we have sitting there. Now it's Donald Trump. As you come in on Connecticut Avenue, there it is right in front of you. And he's talking also about renaming the dollar. airport and a number of other things.

I mean, it's just incredible. It never ends. It's all me, me, me. He wants to build something not unlike the Parisian Ach de Triumph. And, of course, name that after himself. The problem is he can't decide where to put it in Washington. At the same time, he has taken two holidays. I don't know how he could do this.

I'm not crazy about all these holidays, but whatever. He has taken Martin Luther King Day and Juneteenth off the calendar for something involving national parks. I mean, does he not know that his or understand that his successors will undo all of this self-glorification? Yeah, well, I certainly hope they will, but the problem with that is that we the taxpayers are paying the bill. for all these buildings to be redone.

And, of course, there's the biggest expense of all. Of course, will be the banquet hall at the White House. And he keeps claiming that's being done paid by donors. But there's a lot of suspicion about that, who these donors are and what game they have at the end of the day. If it's a military-industrial complex donor, they're on the receiving end. Right. this is obscene the whole thing is obscene and the bank winning hall itself is obscene it was supposed to be 300 people now at 600 people and the price has doubled they destroyed the west west end of the building just to make room for it and it just goes on and on and on how how do hardened military and intelligence community veterans

react when the president says he can kill anybody whether there's a legal case for it or not I mean he's effectively said that he can kill people floating on a boat shipwrecked in the sea he can seize

assets like a pirate on the high seas without a search warrant without evidence of any criminality just because he doesn't want oil to go from Venezuela to Cuba. How do hardened veterans feel about these uses of the military and the intelligence community? Well, I think, again, there's a simple word for it. It's obscene. He is taking

powers that he doesn't actually have, and he's using them to kill and punish people, that with which, with whom we're not at war and who posed no threat to the United States. This business with Venezuela yesterday, the seizure of the tanker. I mean, this is just incredible. It's based on sanctions which were imposed by Trump in his first term when he disputed the result of the presidential election in Venezuela for various idiotic reasons. This is just, you know, this is a game that's being played. I don't know who's supposed to be thinking this is wonderful.

Why should we be spending all this money? Why should we have all these military bases? Why should we be going to war and spending a billion dollars and counting to intimidate Venezuela? Same thing we do with Iran. Same thing we're doing all around the world, except in the one place where he should be doing it. And that would, of course, be Israel. The billion dollars, according to Larry Wilkerson, it's a billion dollars a day to keep all those, this is incredible, to keep all those ships and all those troops there. And because the troops are getting bored or to prepare them for what they're about to do or both, they engaged in war games.

I don't know if I'm using the right words, Phil. they practiced sea land landing getting out of boats and rushing up onto the beach they practiced that in Puerto Rico last week yeah they would probably call them exercises but that's exactly right how you describe it is you know this is this again it just makes no sense in terms of what this country was founded as and makes no sense even going back to our younger days, yours and mine, when the United States was a place that most people in the world looked up to and envied. And now we've become a monster. And this is not just limited to Donald Trump, although I must say that I think he's exacerbated the situation.

He's made it much worse by just being so incompetent and so irrational. And, and delusional. Certainly, Joe Biden was no prize. And it turns out the more we hear about Mr. Obama, he wasn't exactly either. Sir George Bush tortured people. He may have given the torturers a pardon. We don't know. None of them was prosecuted except our friend John Kyriaku, who wasn't a torturer, but he exposed the torture. Barack Obama murdered people, including Americans, and claimed he had a legal authority for it. Joe Biden murdered people. You know, it seems to get worse as each president uses the precedent of his predecessors.

Go all the way back to the Civil War, where Lincoln arrested newspaper editors and journalists in the North for criticizing his managing. of the war. And the Supreme Court, most of which had been filled by a Lincoln appointees, obviously condemned it. It's a very, very famous opinion called In re Milligan. But the essence of the opinion is emergency doesn't create power, and the president can't enhance his own powers, which is basically what he claimed yesterday when he seized that oil tanker. Because I've imposed a sanction, I can now steal this oil and prevent it from going to Cuba. That is antithetical to what the Supreme Court has said about the powers of the presidency. Yeah, and to go back to the Lincoln story, you know, here's Trump playing the same kind of thing

where he humiliates journalists who ask him perfectly reasonable questions. And most of these journalists that he humiliates are women, and he calls them stupid, he calls them ugly, he calls them piggy. And this is so he doesn't have to answer questions, which he's incapable of answering. These are questions that are vital to our understanding of how the balance of powers is supposed to work in our government and how the Constitution is supposed to function. But he just, I don't think he knows anything about the Constitution. Has he ever read it? Or is there anyone on his staff who's ever read it, as far as I can tell? We've gone down a deep hole, and it's going to take a miracle to get out of this.

And who knows? I mean, we are playing tag with several countries, and I'm citing here, particularly Russia, and Israel that are nuclear armed, nuclear powers, and are quite capable of using those weapons and starting something that the entire world will regret. When six members of Congress made that video, it's about 90 seconds long and we've played it over and over again, we don't need to play it now,

which basically admonished members of the military that they don't have to obey illegal orders. And then, of course, we found clips of, Pete Hegseth saying the same thing back when he was at Fox. Right. And then we found a brief filed and signed by a lawyer named Pamela Bondi saying the same things before, of course, she was the attorney general. The president sort of brushed that aside and threatened the members of Congress with death. It is unclear if by death, we know what the word means, but if it's unclear by death, he meant, I'm going to

ask the Attorney General to charge them with a death penalty case and seek the death penalty, or if he meant I'm going to send the Department of Defense to kill them, as I sent the Department of Defense to kill people on a shipwrecked boat? Well, since Trepa said that he could do anything he wants to do, it could be either one. But the interesting thing, of course, is he claimed before coming up with the thing, death possibility, that these people were committing treason. And, you know, this is just absurd. That's not treason.

Yeah, well, again, it gets back to what you said a few minutes ago as he read the Constitution. Treason is the only crime defined in the Constitution, specifically put in there by James Madison, so that people like Trump and his acolytes in the Congress couldn't twist the meaning of treason. Treason means waging war against the United States or providing material assistance to those who do. This is nowhere near treason. The last treason prosecution in America was against a woman named Ida daquino, better known by her popular name of Tokyo Rose. She was convicted and then years later pardoned by President Ford.

It's a long fascinating story. the FBI kidnapped her alibi witnesses from a San Francisco courthouse so they couldn't testify. It was crazy, crazy days. When Trump said recently, and I'm quoting him, he plans to ban, quote, killers, leeches and entitlement junkies, close quote, from coming into the United States, did he have Netanyahu in mind? Well, actually, it was no M that said that said that, though he picked it up. And I had certainly that Njahou in mind when he said that because there's a clear evidence of a killer there and a leech and a few descriptive adjectives that I could come up with in addition to that. And if they're saying, no, we're not going to, this is all part of the plan.

and to block citizens of 19 currently the list of block citizens block countries is 19 long and noam said that we should add immediately 11 more countries to it these are all basically african and middle eastern countries and a large percentage of them are muslims which tells you where this all comes from right but i immediately said hey, if you're using that standard, then definitely Netanyahu and all his staff are guilty of this. And gee, wouldn't it be wonderful if Netanyahu and the other Israelis weren't able to travel to the United States and be here? So we'll see about that. Do you think that the American intelligence community, which has,

tremendous assets invested in Ukraine. Well, there's the cat walking behind you. It's adorable. She's now, you can't see this. Now she's over your right shoulder. That's Frankie. Frankie. He, sorry. Why do we always think cats are girls and dogs are boys? I'm sorry. Pardon me. Do you think that the CIA would effectively be resisting, efforts to bring the war in Ukraine to a close because of all of the assets it's invested in Ukraine. Human assets and physical assets, I think they've built 10 or a dozen new stations. I would give you maybe two answers to that. The first answer would be yes, certainly yes, when you have people whose careers and whose reputations are all tied up with this kind of action,

if you want to call it that, there are going to be a lot of people who basically want this to go on forever. I'm not saying that they want a nuclear war with Russia or anything like that, but I think they would like to see something where they're basically prominent and doing what they think is something important, they would, yeah. But, and I draw on a lot of my former CIA colleagues and certainly some of the ones you have had on your program, who would I think agree with me that CIA is a big organization, 20,000 plus people.

And there are a lot of people in CIA who continue to think, even though they're working for the U.S. government. And I have encountered many before, during, and since, in the intelligence community, more broadly speaking, who are revolted by a lot of this stuff going on. But they're not in any particular position to do anything about it. And that's the problem with the system. What would CIA agents whose careers are invested in this, who have. have a relationship with assets that they control, human assets, who've given a lot of money to these human assets for Intel,

who have physically constructed structures out of which they all work. What would they actually do to impede the peace process? Well, I can only speak again for myself and my colleagues and at the time when we were all together in the agency, and that was kind of up until the time of the Iraq War, I would say that there are buttons to push back on, and you push back on through your own, you know, your own ranks of senior officers that you are working with every day,

you express your misgivings. Certainly when the Iraq war took place, there was a lot of dissent in the agency, and I also understand in military intelligence about the phony intelligence that was being cooked by the usual Zionists, and everybody knew it. And there were people pushing back on it. But ultimately the decisions on all this sort of stuff, it's bumped up to the top. And once it's at the top, it becomes gospel. And the people at the top who have the most to gain and the most to lose are the ones that keep it going. Do we know what has become of Chelsea Gabbard, who hasn't been seen in public in a while and whose views about the proper American foreign policy

does not seem to be woven into the fabric of what Rubio, Witkoff, Kushner, and Trump are doing. Well, she's a perfect example of what I was just saying. I mean, she's a very intelligent, and I think fundamentally, based on her time in Congress, a very decent human being. And I think she's opted to roll over because there's not really a better option for her. And if we had her as a secretary of, oh, God, war, secretary of defense,

I think we would be in a lot better shape now than we are with Meathead. But that's, you know, that's the way this, Donald Trump prefers people who kisses behind and basically treat him like a god and she's not that inclined to do that these other guys are much better at it and women are much better at it but the the thing is i feel sorry for i think she will be gone before too long uh and uh others in the cabinet will be gone apparently too but they'll they'll get somebody else that's just as bad our friend and colleague max blumenthal John Ratcliffe, the head of the CIA. This is a very derogatory term, and maybe you can translate it for us, as the Mossad's stenographer.

Well, that would certainly explain why he's had no profile in Washington whatsoever. He just exists basically to take orders from whoever the Mossad chief is in Washington. That's a funny phrase, and we have to thank you for that. You said Mossad, Chief. Maybe I'm naive, does the Mossad have an office, have a headquarters in Washington? Mossad has a big headquarters in Washington. Otherwise, how could they be spying on us 24 hours a day? Do you remember that case back a couple years ago where they had, shall we say, wired?

all the street lights around Capitol Hill and the way out. Yes, I do remember that. Why do we allow that? We wouldn't allow the Russians or the Chinese to do that. Well, we allow it because of the power of the Israel lobby. And the fact is, when that story broke, the FBI instantly immediately said, this is an Israeli job.

They already had some stuff on it. And then the story disappeared, didn't it? The Israeli Zionist-dominated press went to work. The story went away, and you've never heard anything on it ever since. And for all we know, those street lamps are still bugged. They might well be, which would explain a lot about the information that Trump is getting. What would bugging a street lamp allow the Israelis to do? They allowed the Israelis to intercept phone calls.

within a certain radius. And they obviously had a lot of the phone numbers of particular people in Congress and also in the bureaucracy that they wanted to track and follow and hear what they were saying on the phone. That seems to be the consensus on what this was all about.

It was like a tell tap, but it was done through electronics that were inserted in these streetlights which provided the electricity, the electricity and also provided your access to that immediate area. You know, before we leave, we can go back to where we started, which is Trump's ego. Does he know that Netanyahu and the Mossad have privy to his private conversations in the White House?

He should know it, but since he doesn't know anything else, he probably thinks they're really good guys and Netanyahu in particular deserves that pardon because you know all he did was was steal a lot of money and corrupt their own political system over there which which may be good or bad but the the fact is you know the Trump is totally sold out by the person on the personality that give him money and that praise him and make him feel good like his his episode last week with the soccer, with the World Cup, where the more people give him a phony medal or some praise him for being a great peacemaker and maybe the smartest man in the world, smartest president ever, these are the people that Trump takes to. Chris found some off-the-wall stuff that Trump said

back in March of 2016. Now, at the time, he was in a debate with other republic seeking the Republican nomination for the presidency, which, of course, he won. But here he is with my friend and former colleague, Brett Baer, who's rather startled at the answers. You'll get a kick out of this, Chris, Phil, and it's quite consistent with what you were opining earlier when we were talking about him renaming things in Washington about himself. Chris, number 12. So what would you do as Commander-in-Chief if the U.S. military, refuse to carry out those orders.

They won't refuse. They're not going to refuse me. Believe me. But they're illegal. They then came to me. What do you think of waterboarding? I said it's fine. And if we want to go stronger, I'd go stronger too.

Because frankly, that's the way I feel. Can you imagine, can you imagine these people, these animals over in the Middle East that chop off heads sitting around talking and seeing that we're having a hard problem with waterboarding? We should go for waterboarding. and we should go tougher than waterboarding. But targeting terrorist families? And I'm a leader. I'm a leader. I've always been a leader.

I've never had any problem leading people. If I say do it, they're going to do it. What preceded that was a statement Trump had made saying he was in favor of arresting and torturing family members of at the time. ISIS. Of course, now one of those ISIS people was just embraced by him in the White House as the so-called President of Syria. I'll give you the last word on all this, Phil. It's reprehensible. Well, it is reprehensible. Again, that's a good description of this. This is outrageous. This is a country that was created and grew with the principles of individual liberty and people had rights and the government had to be careful about how it dealt with people.

He's just talking about killing people, going after them and stuff like that. He's going to be a tough guy. This is the guy who dodged the draft with his bonespurs. I guess Vietnam was a little too tough for him, but I gather you and I were in the army at that time, and we put up with it. So, you know, it's just it's outrageous, outrageous that this guy is in charge and is getting away with murder.

Figuratively and literally. Phil Giraldi, thank you, my dear friend. I know this is not your usual time. I appreciate it deeply, the best to you and your family, and we'll look forward to seeing you next week. Thank you. Look forward to it also. Thank you.

And coming up later today, 11 this morning, Colonel Douglas McGregor at 2 this afternoon, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, at 3 this afternoon. I don't know where he is, but Chris will find him, Pepe Escobar, at 4 this afternoon, who's pretty hot still over these murders in the Caribbean, Scott Ritter. Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom. Thank you.

Thank you.