Judging Freedom - Phil Giraldi : Why Hegseth Should Be Tried For War Crimes.

Episode Date: December 3, 2025

Phil Giraldi : Why Hegseth Should Be Tried For War Crimes.See 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 Wednesday, December 3rd, 2025. My dear friend Phil Geraldi joins us now. Phil, before we get to the Secretary of Defense and his war crimes, I was rereading your most recent piece about Jonathan Pollard. Why was Netanyahu all smiles almost giddy when he greeted Pollard at the at Tel Aviv airport as he was getting out of Mrs. Zadelson's private jet. Well, that's, of course, an interesting story and an interesting thing to interpret it from the U.S. perspective. What Netanyahu was doing was playing a certain role that was very popular with the Israeli market, you know, where this hero who enabled the state of Israel to develop nuclear weapons to, of course, protect itself, was there in Israel. And, of course, they made preparations right from the beginning to celebrate him and named the square after him, eventually had named a town after him.

They had actual celebrations featuring him in Israel after he arrived and this went on for a while. So it's something we should look at from the perspective of Israel, which is always completely self-centered.

And Netanyahu was pretty sure that he got the assurance from Trump, who of course let him travel to Israel. that there would be no repercussions from the United States. You know, having sentenced more than a thousand people in my career as a judge, I'm familiar with what's called a pre-sentence investigation report, which accumulates a lot of materials for the judge about the now convicted defendant. Often these are materials that didn't make their way into the trial.

One of the materials that was given to the judge who sentenced Pollard was a 46- or 47-page report compiled by Casper Weinberger, the Secretary of Defense at the time. What I was able to read was damning and scurrilous, but much of it, even to this day, is redacted. What was redacted, not precisely, but what was the name? nature of what the judge didn't see and you and i can't see if we go and look at this thing well actually that's pretty simple the damage that he did was so severe in terms of the collection abilities and analysis abilities by u.s intelligence all the way across the board that the judge saw that caspar weinberger saw that but it would have not it would have been a secure violation to reveal just how devastating the information that he obtained and eventually was shared.

Now, this is the other part of the story, too. The information that was shared by the Israeli government, once it got it, it shared some of this really sensitive intelligence collection information with the Russians. And they did this so that the Russians would let Jews in Russia and the Soviet Union, obviously at that time, emigrate to Israel. So this was what Israel did with some of this information. And some additional information, technical information, went to the Chinese who used it to develop their missile systems and some of their aeronautics.

these are things that these people were adversaries or opponents of the United States at the time. Israel had no hesitation to share this information. And that, of course, was also not referred to directly in any of the documentation. Now, in fairness to President Trump, Pollard had finished serving his term, but he had not finished the probation. It was the probation part of his term, which often thought. follows a jail term, often probation is contingent, or often early release is contingent upon probation. It was the probation that Trump commuted, which allowed him immediately to leave the United States and be separated from his probation officers permanently.

That's when he got on the Aeelson's jet and Pluto. Yeah, that's correct. And the thing to bear in mind is why he had that probation was essentially because there was some concern that he had knowledge of secrets that still would be damaging, that would be revealed to Israel if he were to go to Israel. And that's why he was restricted in travel and on probation to prevent him from doing just that. So that's, again, Trump ignored that and basically let him go.

And it's not known to this day what other stuff he might have revealed. Got it. All right. Switching gears. Can the Secretary of Defense reasonably expect that if he gives an order to an admiral to kill unarmed non-combatants that the order will be complied with? Well, that depends on how you want to look at it. As you well know, having gone through the process of being in the military and having restrictions in terms of the kinds of things you can do,

it's not really that simple. There is an expectation that orders will be obeyed up and down the line. But if something is plausibly a war crime, meaning killing civilians, for example, and that sort of thing, which is what took place in this situation, then there is another set of rules that come into play, which is that you don't do that. It's not something that is considered an unlawful command or an illegal order depending on how you want to look at it and uh the the general in charge mr bradley or the admiral uh admiral bradley uh basically passed the order onto his uh seal team that were operating in the area uh to carry off the killing but there is some confusion uh as of this this day and during the last few days about what hegg said

is now claiming or was claiming and what Trump was claiming about who gave the the permission to do this at the higher level. Heckst, in the beginning, was conceded that he did it, but now we're around to the arguments and no, it really wasn't that way. He wasn't in the room. And so on and so forth. And Trump at a certain point was saying that it was perfectly acceptable in terms of what the war situation was in the Caribbean.

So we have all kinds of narratives floating out there, but the general rule is if you have some civilians, unarmed civilians hanging onto a piece of wood in the Caribbean, you don't finish the job by going in and killing them. Wouldn't the admiral be familiar with the requirement of the Uniform Code of Military Justice that shipwrecked people? even if you caused the shipwreck, people who are alive, even though you tried to kill them, you have a duty to save. That's right. That's absolutely correct.

And that's the humanitarian thing to do. This is what came out of the Second World War, when we're, you know, the Geneva Conventions. And there was a lot of pressure coming from the United States, incidentally, to a large extent, to make war, the process of war more humane. And this was one of the things that came out of it. Here's a clip. It's actually three different clips. One is from 2016, which is the time period during which I was working with Pete Hague, Seth, at Fox News.

And he appears to be giving a speech, not a Fox product, but a speech that somebody had hired him to give. And he basically says illegal orders should not be obeyed. The second is Hegg Seth on Fox and Friends, of which he is a former host, and I am a former host. The day after this killing in which he says he knew everything that was happening and he saw all of it and everybody was killed and rightly so. And the third is his efforts yesterday at a cabinet meeting to obfuscate what he knew and when he knew it. We'll watch all three of these clips back to back to back. some guys at Leavenworth who made really bad choices on the battlefield. And I do think there have to be consequences for abject war crimes.

If you're doing something that is just completely unlawful and ruthless, then there is a consequence for that. That's why the military said it won't follow unlawful orders from their commander-in-chief. There's a standard, there's an ethos, there's a belief that we are above what so many things that our enemies are others would do. I watched it live. We knew exactly who was in that boat. We knew exactly what they were doing, and we knew exactly who they represented. I watched that first strike live. As you can imagine, at the Department of War, we got a lot of things to do. So I didn't stick around for the hour and two hours, whatever, where all the sensitive site exploitation digitally occurs. So I moved on to my next meeting. I did not personally see survivors,

but I stand, because the thing was on fire. It was exploded in fire or smoke. You can't see You got digital. This is called the fog of war. Pete will show up to testify under oath before the Senate Armed Services Committee. Which one of those three? Well, and then there's a version that came out today, which is that he claims he was not even in the room when all of this was on the video screen. So just in that last clip, he was saying that he saw it, he was there.

It was flames coming, this was going on, and now all of a sudden he's saying he wasn't even there. So, you know, this is incredible. Are members of the military, he was alluding to Leavenworth, which is a military prison. It's also a civilian prison, but it's a military prison. It's not a very pleasant place, but he was saying there are people in Leavenworth who made the wrong decisions on the battlefield. He must be referring to people who killed civilians. I mean, my question to you is, does the United States military court-martial fancy military word for prosecute soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines who kills unarmed civilians? Well, the short answer to that is sometimes, and I would cite the case of Lieutenant Callie from the Vietnam War, and there were some lesser,

publicized instances during the Vietnam War of civilians being killed, that there were certain proceedings. I wouldn't say they went to a complete court martial or anything like that, but people were punished in various ways for killing civilians and doing other engaging in other atrocities. So the U.S. government is very selective about how it does this. And the only reason someone like Cali went through what he did was because, obviously, it's the usual reason. This thing was kind of photographed, and there were press reports about it, and so it could not be avoided. I forget what happened in the Cali case. I mean, I know a lot of civilians were slaughtered.

Was he convicted or acquitted? Yeah, no, he was convicted, and he was – there was – there was – certain punishments he was reduced in rank obviously he was uh dismissed from the service i don't remember if he actually did any hard time or not but that was maybe a possibility right uh let me switch gears if i could to your thoughts on venezuela do you think trump is actually going to invade or do you think this killing of the boat people and uh amassing of a of a of an armada off the coast of Venezuela as some sort of a bluff to see what kind of a deal he can get involving oil?

Well, you know, clearly it could go either way, except for it to go as kind of a bluff would depend on one feeling that Trump is capable of that kind of dissimulation. I have a feeling that there is going to be some kind of ground force intervention and Venezuela, how complete or how total it will be, I have no idea, but Trump keeps raising the issue of we're going on land, we're doing this, we're doing that, and he keeps raising the issue of killing people in connection with what's going on in the Caribbean. So he's not shy about that. I think he's quite crazy enough to do it.

And I think it depends on what impulse seizes him in the morning when he gets up and decides he has to say something. And he might have Gorka or somebody like that whispering in his ear, telling

him that, oh, we have to do this. And this is the dignity of the United States and to deal with these narco traffickers. And so, and so on and so forth. So it's a, it's an awful issue. But at the same time, we have people like Senator Rand Paul, who today are arguing that either Trump, in terms of what he knew about what was going on with this killing incident, or was not knowledgeable of it, in which case

He was basically incompetent in not knowing that, not requiring these people that he had afforded to notify him when something like this, which is potentially a bad situation for the media, he is kind of not connected and doesn't always know what's going to happen. All right. So I'm going to play a clip from a member of Trump's administration, who just a month ago pointed out the futility of regime changes. She was obviously referring to Venezuela. They pretty much silenced her. But here she is. You'll know who this is in a moment. Cut number 11. For decades, our foreign policy has been trapped in a counterproductive and endless cycle of regime change or nation building. It was a one-size-fits-all approach of toppling regimes, trying to impose our system of governance on others, intervene in conflicts that were barely understood and walk away with more enemies than allies. The results, trillions spent, countless lives lost, and in many cases a creation of greater security threats. President Trump was elected by the American people. to put an end to this from day one he has showed a very different way to conduct foreign policy

she doesn't look very happy but she's very clear in what she was saying apart from the last sentence right has been very clear he certainly hasn't been i i think she's being kind of delegated to occasional press appearances i i understand she's absolutely correct up until that last sentence And I understand there was a high-level security meeting last week in the White House, and she wasn't invited. She is the only one who talks since, and the only one who anyone should be listening to. And, of course, that would make her an outlier in terms of this administration. I respected her ever since she was in Congress, where she – I recall where she went to Syria.

to see if all the propaganda that the U.S. government was coming out with about what was going on in Syria, she went to look and see it for herself and came back with a fair judgment. So she's got that in her head. She's got the integrity, but the question is, is she going to be willing to really go to the wall on it if she wants to keep her job? And Trump is quite capable of firing any one of the people that we've just been talking about because Trump basically doesn't care to him. Ultimately, it's all the question of loyalty to him. And loyalty means to roll over and agree with absolutely everything he says and does. Here's Trump trying to explain whatever Hegg said told him or did not tell him about the

second killing, the killing of the two guys that survived the initial attack. Chris cut number one. And Pete said he did not want them. He didn't even know what people were talking about. So we'll look into it. But no, I wouldn't have wanted that, not the second strike. The first strike was very lethal. It was fine. And if there were two people around, but Pete said that didn't happen.

So we have yet a third version of Pete said it didn't happen. That's why I asked you earlier which one, which Pete will show up when he's under oath. testifying before a senator armed services committee. Who knows? They'll probably take the testimony in secret so we won't even know what he says. Yeah, there'll be restrictions on it, that's for sure. And, of course, they're going to, you know, there are senators that don't have great records on a lot of this stuff either.

So there'll be a little bit of playing back and forth in terms of what they feel is fair game and what is it. Right, right. Phil, thank you very much, my dear man. Sorry, these topics are so uncomfortable, but you make it clear, and I deeply appreciate your analysis. All the best. We'll look forward to seeing you next week. Thank you very much. You look forward to it. Thank you. And coming up at 3.45 today, sort of our finale on all of this, although we'll be discussing some of it tomorrow.

Pete Heggseth, the self-made war criminal, with who else, Scott Ritter, Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom. Thank you.