Judging Freedom - Phil Giraldi : Trump’s Madness (take two)

Episode Date: August 27, 2026

Phil Giraldi : Trump’s Madness (take two)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. Tragically, 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 Thursday, August 27, 2006. The great Phil Giraldi is with us. He was with us yesterday, but we had a lot of internet problems, so you'll get a full dose of Phil today. How crazy is the president of the United States from the perspective of a seasoned serious intelligence community veteran? But first this. Throughout history, governments have rarely surrendered power voluntarily. They seek more control over our money, our movements, and ultimately our freedoms. That's why it's smart to understand your legal options before you need them. I'd like to recommend a free special report from McEl Thorpe,

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That's expatmoney.com slash judge. Phil Giraldi, welcome here. Thank you for coming back for a second to try at this. the internet issues now appear to be behind us. I do want to talk to you about two recent pieces, dynamite pieces that you wrote on the president's madness, one of which is called Dumb and Dumber. But before we do, what is your evaluation, what are your thoughts on the director of the Central Intelligence Agency spending four hours in the Kremlin this week? Well, you know, it's kind of shocking, actually.

I spent something like 25 years in various aspects of the United States intelligence community, mostly CIA. And I cannot recall a single instance of a CIA director traveling to a country considered to be, shall we say, an adversary or competitor, to engage in a kind of disappears to be have been unplanned, unexpected, arranged at the last moment, talk with hopefully the head of state, which of course didn't happen. He wound up talking with people below that level and spent four hours and then flew out and nobody seems to know what it was all about. Well, I would I would suggest that this thing is so bizarre

this is something straight out of the head of Donald Trump. And it probably has something to do with two issues. And the two issues would first of all be the expectation that's floating

in the European media and in European chanceries that the Russians might be prepared some kind of military strike, a serious military strike, against NATO countries that are complicit in the Ukrainian effort to attack Russia. And of course, I would point out that that would include the United States as a NATO member in this, and there may be concerned that this is about to escalate.

But that would indicate that Trump is actually concerned about other people and killing other people. He's clearly not. I think this is just something to claim another victory in terms of the war that's going on there. And I think the other issue, of course, would be Iran, where essentially we have this mixed situation developing there, where we are going to destroy Iran by destroying the Iranian economy. And that would include secondary sanctions on countries like Russia and China that have significant trade with the Iranians. So are they sending a signal on that one too? Are they really seriously thinking that sending over uniquely the director of central intelligence instead of the normal channel like State Department will really make any kind of difference?

I think a lot of people today are scratching your heads and trying to figure out what this is all about. But it's just the whole thing is very strange. Doesn't make any sense. and is not likely to produce any good result. This director of Central Intelligence has no experience in intelligence before this job. Am I right? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, he's another one of the people that Trump brought in with him

that had no specific background in the areas that they were intended to be working in. And this is perhaps why everything is as, shall we say, screwed up as it is. But this one is particularly bad because it's like they don't seem to understand that the whole situation between Ukraine and Russia was something that was triggered. The conflict itself was triggered by intervention by the bridge. and the Americans to get the Ukrainians to take an aggressive position vis-a-vis Russia. And, of course, the Russians on their side had the Minsk agreement, which the Ukrainians did not comply with. And that's a major reason why the Russians took a more aggressive position themselves. So it's all like, come on, guys, stick this thing through from top to bottom or bottom to top,

whichever way works best for you and figure out that there were ways to resolve this, and there's still my way ways to resolve it, but sending over a top intelligent official with messages of suggesting that the Russians back off these issues rather than pursue them, it's not the way to go. Wow. Well, here's what Trump said in a radio interview with my friend and former colleague Glenn Beck. I think Trump's response is ridiculous, but please reply to it once we run this clip. Chris, number 15.

The CIA director, ours, is in Russia. Rumors are saying Putin is going to test NATO resolve all the way to speculation that is crazy. He's going to strike England. All the way to this is maybe the U.S. telling them about the Iranian sanctions saying we're serious about them. Can you tell me why our CIA director flew in the middle of the night to meet with the Russians? Well, none of the above. He's there, you know, very sort of semi-routine. I hate to disappoint people. We would like to see the war with Ukraine end. I've been an American government official in Moscow in five years.

How the hell can he call this, quote, semi-routine? It must be the semi part that he's relating to. As I said in the beginning, to my knowledge, having served overseas for Boku years and having encountered countries and being in countries and knowledgeable of countries that we were adversarial with, I cannot recall a similar ploy like this to. somehow end the Ukraine and Russia war, which they blew the chance to do that back in anchor and blew it before that when the British intervened and said, no, we want Ukraine to fight Russia on behalf of NATO and the U.S., you know, this is just ridiculous. us. If Russia, if the Kremlin was planning an attack on British arms manufacturers, German arms manufacturers, would the CIA, a year or two from now, would the CIA know about those plans?

That's a good question. It kind of depends on to what level these issues are being. discussed at a tactical level. And what I'm saying here is if these issues were serious enough or these proposals were serious enough, they would have to be bringing in military personnel down to a lower level to start doing the planning and the calculations as to what this would entail. And other people brought in to discuss what this would be political. And if that is the case, then the CIA probably or CIA allies probably using technical means would have picked up some of the stuff. But if this was just somebody kind of flying over on a whim, as it were, and discussing issues, then probably the substance for this is pretty thin.

and they wouldn't have had the kind of specific information that would trigger a serious response as opposed to four hours there and back. Would President Putin be expected to meet with John Ratcliffe any more than Donald Trump would be expected to meet with the head of the FSB? Well, I mean, Donald Trump is only expected to meet with Israeli intelligence officers. Right. So I would put that out. But the fact is that no, the simple answer is no.

The President of the United States does not meet, to the best of my knowledge, has never met with the head of intelligence of, again, an adversary country or a competitor, a serious competitor country, which Russia, China and others have been deemed. to be for as long as I can remember. So, no, the simple answer is that this is way beyond that yardstick. Wow. All right. Moving to your article about dumb and dumber, it appears that Trump was very bitter when his longtime press secretary, Carolyn Levitt, arguably as tenacious and rude with the press, as he is, nevertheless was allowed to stay in the decoy Air Force One, was not told the president wasn't there, was not told that the plane was a decoy, was not told that the Secret Service believed the nonsense from Assad that the plane was a target. And after they landed and she went

home and talked to her husband, she came in the next day and quit. And then Trump posted a picture of himself saying the best press secretary was a picture of him, not her. Aside from dumb and dumber, how do you read this? Well, that's a pretty good description. The fact is, you know, here he left, he went from one plane to the other, accompanied by, gathered from the press accounts, three people. So if she was missing, it would have been pretty easy to notice that she was missing. And she's certainly a key player or was a key player in his administration in terms of trying to get the lies across to the media and to others.

So this is a very important key individual, and he didn't really care enough about her to get her off the decoy plane. And he wonders perhaps why she might have been upset by that and decided that. she had better things to do with the rest of her life. But this is typical Trump. During the past week, he's posed a number of really ridiculous photo montage, shall we say, of himself doing incredible things. And this one, of course, is that he would be the best choice for his own secretary, which is ridiculous because he can't even manage what he's doing now.

This photo that we're showing now, he posted himself on Truth Social. To the lower left as you're facing it is George W. Bush with Mission Not Accomplaced. That's a true statement. That, of course, is the disaster in Afghanistan. And on the right is a picture of the murdered by Netanyahu's people and Trump's people, Ayatollah, and it says Mission Accomplice. This is a disgraceful and despicable photo or montage, but this is what Trump wants everybody to believe. Yeah, and he's also had, of course, some pictures of himself in military uniform marching by, with Patton and showing that he is, you know, one of the guys.

This is no guy. This is a guy who balks at everything that makes any sense. And it comes out with this kind of stuff. What he accomplished in Iran was turning Iran, which was probably with that leadership, willing to negotiate some kind of reasonable settlement about the Strait of Hormuz and other issues. And, of course, they never had,

according to our intelligence, I knew their weapon in development. And so this was all a fraud as to why this person had to be killed. And the fact is that made the Iranians, if anything, more prepared to resist and garnished support among the Iranian people for the regime, which was a bit shaky in some areas. but it ain't so much anymore. So this is a complete lie and a complete falsehood. I'll go along with the George Bush Afghanistan thing,

just as we could go along with some other presidents in recent vintage who have made blunders like that. But you know, this job of painting the president with a glory brush to show what a hero he is and how he's in line for the Nobel Peace Prize again coming up. This is incredible. Trump entered into some sort of an agreement about which he boasted involving Gaza and he permitted Netanyahu to veto it. and then he sent his son-in-law ambassador sorry i don't know if they call question their ambassador or not he's obviously not confirmed by the senate but whatever then he sent his son-in-law there to talk to nettingahu

and then the son-in-law praised natin-yahu's veto of the trump agreement what was the agreement that trump claimed he made that he permitted netting yahoo to veto and his son-in-law to praise the vetoing if you follow me Yeah, well, I mean, this was all about the Board of Peace. And Tony Blair was also involved in it, which tells you something. But anyway, the idea was that the agreement would be that Hamas would completely disarm as a first step. And then, after that was accomplished, to the satisfaction of everyone involved, which presumably would be the U.S. government and its friends in the area,

the Israelis would stage a gradual withdrawal from the part of Gaza, which they have been occupying, and the peace group would then recruit a peace group of soldiers drawn from various friendly countries who would be willing to kind of stand between the two sides and make sure that the peace was maintained. So anyway, this is, you can judge this as being a reasonable kind of agreement or not. There are certain flaws in it right from the beginning, but the fact is it could have been a solution. So what happens is Netanyahu bore immediately.

wasn't interested. And he sent Jared Kushner, who's his special envoy, to talk to Netanyahu. Netanyahu told him to go to hell. And the next thing we know, we have Kushner saying, and now the United States completely supports Israel in terms of whatever it wants to do, which is to obviously continue the genocide. So that's what we're. we're stuck with here. And this is why dumb and dumber seem to be an appropriate label for some of the stuff going on.

Wow. What conceivable basis is there for Trump to claim that the United States owns I can't say this for the straight face, Phil. The straight of Hormuz.

No basis whatsoever. And it's probably about as much of a basis as his claim that the United States can call Ontario America, which he's also doing. And there's also a lesser story, which I've only seen referred to once or twice, is an oil exploration company that's linked to the business interests of the Trump family. landed in Greenland and started digging. And they didn't tell the Greenland government anything about what they were doing or why they were there, or the Danish government, which is the overlord of Greenland. And this is the kind of stuff that's going on. And it's so incredible that it's almost ridiculous to cite it and to pretend or to be appearing to pretend that,

this is some kind of logical move by a government that's responsible. I meant to play this a few minutes ago and I'll play it now. This is the BBC's lead correspondent in Russia commenting about director Ratcliffe in comparing him to Whitkoff and, well, you can decide the comparison between him to Whitkoff and Kushner, Chris No. 19. He's the highest-level American official to have visited Russia in five years. The importance of this cannot be overstated. As America's chief, non-public diplomat with official status,

the CIA director may be more useful than Whitkoff and Kushner for organizing regular dialogue. Moskovsky Kamsamolitz notes that Western media have been claiming that he came to warn the Russians, that allegedly the US has information about preparations in Russia for a new mobilization to finish off Ukraine or for a possible attack on European countries to test NATO's readiness, or both. Wow, he chooses to communicate in that way with his voice and the English comments on yellow

stickies on top of Russian newspapers, but that is probably a universal view that almost any American emissary would be more credible than Whitkoff and Kushner. Well, that's true, but at the same time, I would point out that if sending your CIA director has a kind of a tone to it, and I would think that it would have sort of a threatening aspect to it, and of course we know President Trump is very big on threats as his form of diplomacy. I would have thought that the right person to go, even though he's an idiot, would be Rubio. I mean, he's the Secretary of State. This is in a real sense a state issue.

And where in the past, of course, we have where we had multi-state negotiations over various issues, Secretary of State is the go-to guy. So I'm just wondering about the choice of the director of CIA, who admittedly has only limited personal access in this kind of situation. It might be a bad choice just for that, but this is not necessarily your best choice. And the fact that he was there for four hours hardly speaks for the reception being warm and fuzzy, does it?

Right, right. They probably didn't even offer him a meal. Where is Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State? He's not involved with Russia. He's not involved with Ukraine. He's not involved with Iran. Maybe he's the viceroy of Venezuela, and that pleases him.

Well, what I'm saying to there? Go ahead. There's a lot of oil coming out of Venezuela, apparently. Wow. One of the two last questions. This is kind of disgusting, but I have to ask you this. Why did West Bank terrorists torture a donkey? Well, this is because this is the kind of people they are.

They go into Palestinian villages on the West Bank. These are the settlers. They go into Palestinian villages. They kill people. they torture people they will also kill livestock because the livestock

and the trees with the olives are the what the Palestinian families need to survive to sell these products in this case they they beat a man up

a Palestinian man a Christian incidentally they took his donkey a very gentle, peaceful animal. They tied it to the back of their pickup truck and dragged him until he died. They tortured him to death. This is the kind of people we're dealing with

among a certain type of Israeli. And these people are being encouraged and allowed to run amok by their own government, which of course encourages them. It's being de facto as a consequence being encouraged their behavior like this by certainly our esteemed ambassador there, Mr. Mike Huckabee, and certainly by the Trump administration, which basically will do anything for Israel has never turned Netanyahu down. What will Trump do if Israel follows the advice of Naftali? Bannett, who's leading in the polls to replace Netanyahu, and Jonathan Pollard, who's the great American trader who's about to be elected to the Knesset, and attacks Turkey. Turkey's in

NATO. What will Trump do if the Israelis attack Turkey? Well, I would predict that Trump will do nothing. He will let Israel attack Turkey, but they are going to be in for a big surprise. I served in Istanbul for three years. I worked with the Turkish military. They are an exemplary military. And I think the Israelis will be for a big surprise. They're also, of course, talking about invading Egypt. That's another place that's kind of on the list. And one of the things that really kind of gets me is there was a report this week. you probably saw where somebody from an inside source on the Trump administration said that at least three occasions, Donald Trump has raised with his military and intelligence staff the possibility of using nuclear weapons. So this is something.

And Iran. Well, no, it's kind of a more generic viewpoint than that. that, then why do we have all these nice weapons sitting around and we don't use them? It's to create a formula whereby in certain circumstances you will be able to go nuclear. And that's kind of it. What we need is for Congress to pass a law to say that the United States will never use nuclear weapons unless we are the first victim of a nuclear weapon. But we don't have anything like that.

Wow. Bill Giraldi, thank you, my dear man. Thanks for the double duty this week. I'm glad the Internet Gremlins are gone, and we'll look forward to seeing you again soon. All my best, dear friend. Absolutely. Thank you. Sure. Coming up later today on all of this, at 2 o'clock, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson. At 3 o'clock, the Golden Boy, Max Blumenthal, Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom.