Judging Freedom - Scott Ritter : EU Silences Col. Jacques Baud

Episode Date: December 22, 2025

Scott Ritter : EU Silences Col. Jacques BaudSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

New Year energy is all about resetting routines, feeling healthier, and starting fresh. Why not give your dog the same reset? From daily walks to better habits at home, our dogs are always right there with us. Ollie helps you start the new year with intention, beginning with your dog's bowl. With fresh, protein-packed meals crafted from real human-grade ingredients, your dog can start the year feeling their best, too. Choose from five recipes and get a personalized plan for your dog's needs. Meals arrive perfectly portioned with a scoop and storage container, so serving is fast and mess-free.

And with Ollie's in-app on-demand health screenings, tap real experts whenever you need peace of mind. Visit ollie.com slash crossover and use code crossover for 60% off your first box. Thank you. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for judging freedom. Today is Monday, December 22nd, 2025. Scott Ritter will be with us in just a moment on the EU silencing and stealing from Colonel Jacques Bo. But first, this. History tells us every market eventually falls. Currencies collapse. And look at where we are now. 38 trillion in national debt. Stocks have record highs defying gravity. So what happens next? Groceries, gas, housing, everything's going up. And this dollar, it buys less every day.

When the system breaks, your stocks won't save you and your dollars won't either. But one thing will. Gold. I've set it on my show for years. Gold survives collapse. Central bankers know this and billionaires know it. That's why they're buying more. Is it too late to buy or is it just the right time?

Call my friends at Lear Capital to find out. Ask questions. Get the free information. There's no pressure. And that's why I buy my gold and silver from Lear. And right now you can get up to $20,000 in bonus medals with a qualified purchase. Call 800, 511, 4620 or go to Learjudgeonnapp.com today. Scott Rader, welcome here, my dear friend. Thank you for accommodating my schedule, the short week for all of us because of Christmas on Thursday.

Before we get to the EU and Colonel Boe and the significance of what happened to him without any due process, I want to ask you a few questions about China, because in the past two weeks, the following occurred. The Trump administration's national security strategy came out and referred to China as not an enemy, but an economic competitor. Good, probably true. The National Defense Authorization Act came out, which gives the Pentagon more than a trillion dollars. And in that is $11 billion to Taiwan for offensive weaponry. And the United States seized last weekend a Venezuelan oil tanker destined to go through the Panama Canal and make its way to China. Do the Trump people know what they're doing? No.

I mean, this, I hate to be this blunt, but if you take a look at the people that they've staffed the national security positions with, you know, in the past, we used to get, you know, when we talked about. Russia. We got Russophobes. I mean, people who actually hated Russia, a visceral hatred, Fiona Hill. She had, she has no love for Russia. You know, Christopher Ford, who, you know, negotiating arms control, he hates Russia and hates arms control. And yet he was the man responsible for negotiating arms control with Russia, which is why he ended up killing the INF Treaty. Today on China, we don't have Chinese experts. We have people who hate China. And sometimes their hatred just comes down to it's the communist party therefore they are evil they don't know anything about china they don't know anything about chinese policy um to them

simply you know doing anything that can that can constrain the dragon is a good thing without any notion of what the consequences of their actions will be you know the the the document may say they view china as an economic competitor but the reality is if you treat china as an adversary. The rest of that document says, for instance, that the United States will be seeking conventional military overmatch in the Pacific. That means that we have said we are going to dominate China with conventional military power as a way of deterring any potential Chinese strike against Taiwan. Oh, by the way, we're giving $11 billion to Taiwan for weapons that are capable offensive operations against China, even though we ostensibly endorse a one-chievous,

China policy linked to a decision by the United Nations that said China controls everything, including Taiwan. We simply don't know what we do. We don't know what we stand for. We don't know what our policies are. And it's going to come back to haunt us because the Chinese are ready. The Chinese are prepared and the Chinese aren't afraid of us. Isn't this military overmatch U.S. to China an impossibility? Yeah. 100%. I mean, again, first of all, it's the Pacific. So you need boats. You need ships. The Chinese, you know, punch out hundreds of ships a year. I think over 400. You know, we don't come anywhere near that number. We're talking, you know, on our submarine production, in order to maintain the status quo of existing submarine France, we have to produce somewhere around 2.5 submarines a year. producing 1.7. And it's the same with our other, you know, the, the keels that we lay for

other ships. We just don't produce ships in the quantities or in the quality necessary to compete with China. You know, one of the reasons why we got out of the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty in 2019 was because we feared Chinese overmatch in terms of intermediate nuclear forces, intermediate range missiles, 500 to 500, 500 miles. And, you know, we were supposed to match them with the Dark Eagle, you know. Well, the Dark Eagle isn't operational yet. It may be operational. We don't know.

But even if it does become operational, you know, when you look at it, it's a whole bunch of money to produce a missile at a rate of one per month that doesn't do very much damage. It's not a nuclear capable missile. So we've spent all this money. We've just destroyed arms control, destroyed global stability. So that we can say, look, we have an intermediate range missile now. We can deploy against China. It's not as powerful as a cruise missile, a conventional cruise missile. When we took out the Taji missile production facility during Desert Storm, you know, we hit Taji with, you know, over a hundred individual cruise missile points.

We, it would take 100 months to produce 100 dark eagles and they couldn't do the damage that was done. This is how stupid we are. We are nowhere close to having conventional overmatch for the Chinese. The Chinese outclasses in every way, shape, and form when it comes to projecting power into the immediate region that they live in. China's not a world power like we are. They don't project, you know, blue water navies halfway around the world. But China is very good at projecting power into the waters off of China into the first island chain and stuff. They have unmatched conventional power, and we're not.

ever going to get near them. And so this is a bad strategy. We're going to just waste a lot of money, a lot of time to eventually realize, as we are with the Russians, that when we sit down with the Chinese, we actually have to take their legitimate national security interests into account. And sometimes that means that we have to back off of things that just don't make any sense. Just like we have to back off of Ukraine, we're going to have to back off of Taiwan pretty soon because we're putting missiles in Taiwan. We all know from history, although I was alive, when it happened, when Russia put missiles in Havana. Suppose Beijing puts missiles in Havana.

Does the Trump administration expect that it would sit back and do nothing? No. First of all, the missiles we're putting into Taiwan aren't strategic in nature. And the Chinese have the ability to take these out. That's the frustrating thing about this, is that we're spending $11 billion on giving Taiwan a Cape a capability that simply turns it into a target because all the Chinese are going to do is locate where all this material goes and then target it with, you know, one of the thousands of ballistic missiles they possess that Taiwan will never be able to reach.

Taiwan will cease to exist as a civilization, as a nation state, as a place capable of sustaining life before a single Chinese soldier sets foot on their soil. This is the reality. And it will happen instantaneously so fast that the United States won't be able to mobilize. You know, we don't even have a war plan for Taiwan now because we're not allowed to have a war plan for Taiwan because Taiwan doesn't really exist. It's not a sovereign state. So what we have is a modification of a war plan for Korea. But that war plan for Korea to get 700 to 900,000 troops to Korea takes months, if not years in the total effort of the United States.

States. We don't have those troops anymore. All the troops that are earmarked for that plan are doing other things. We don't have the ability to back up our rhetoric on Taiwan with anything other than nuclear weapons. And therein lies the rub because this stupidity that we're getting ourselves into pushes us down a path that can only lead to nuclear confrontation. And when that happens, we all die. And, you know, so it's a policy of suicide as opposed to a policy promoting you know national security i want to move on to a rush but i got to tell you this crazy comment that you uh paraphrased uh china's dangerous because they're communists i've heard this from senator tom cotton who's a graduate of harvard law school and sits in the

united states senate and whispers into the president's ear yep and you hear from uh from Druscoll, the U.S. Army Secretary, who's apparently the coolest things to sliced bread. Oh, he's the heir apparent to Hegseth, when they realize that Hegseth has been murdering people. Well, if you think Driscoll's going to do better, don't. No. He may not be the push-up and pull-up fanatic that Hegseth is, but his brain works just as well, which means it doesn't work at all. What do you think Whitkoff, Kushner, and Carol Demetriov are talking about? They can't be talking about whether Ukraine should be in NATO.

That is non-negotiable. They can't be talking about whether Ukraine would be neutral and its military forces would be below 100,000. That's non-negotiable. They can't talk about the land of Russian-speaking peoples return to Russia. not negotiable. What are they negotiating? Look, I think the Trump administration has its eye on the post-conflict reality, meaning that they accept the fact that Ukraine and Europe are not going to allow this negotiation to go through. They'll go through the motions, they'll listen so they can't be accused of not listening, and they'll take the message to Dmitriev and to

to Uschikov and to Putin when they meet with him. And then the Russians will say the same thing. Just what you did. No, no, no, no, no. But we got a trillion dollar possibility in terms of the exploitation of, you know, the North Arctic's wealth. We've got, you know, another trillion dollar possibility in rare earth minerals. Man, when we finally get this thing going, you know, it's going to be good for both of us.

And that's what they're talking about. You know, the other stuff is just show. You can talk all you want about security guarantees. But if there's not a nation left to guarantee the security of, it doesn't matter. And the way Ukraine's going right now, there's not going to be a Ukraine left by the time this is all said and done. They just assassinated a lieutenant general in downtown Moscow. You know, it's an act of terrorism. And if you don't understand the Russians and, you know, because the Russians, you know, because the

Russians aren't going to, you know, panic and do what America would do, lock the whole country down and shut down every airport and frisk every dog. The Russians will just get on with their business and do what they do. But they're writing down names. I mean, Budano's a dead man. He's the head of the intelligence service that carried this out. If he doesn't understand it, he has zero life expectancy. He will not survive this conflict. And everybody with him will also pay the ultimate price.

the Ukrainian leadership is a terrorist organization. Russians identify them as such. And so they're sitting there negotiating the future. None of them will have a chance to enjoy because they're all literally dead men walking. The Wall Street Journal reports that Trump is about to propose a high-tech Gaza, that Gaza will be turned into some sort of a glamorous high-tech. tech facility, and they're soon going to be looking for investors.

Alster Crook says that there is no such thing as the Gaza ceasefire. Trump has lost control over Netanyahu, and when Gaza collapses, Netanyahu's going to blame Trump. How do you view all this? First of all, it's pie in the sky. If Gaza was stable today, you know, turning Trump's vision into reality is something would have a timeline that goes well beyond, you know, Trump's remaining three years in power. You know, he doesn't have another term.

And, you know, it's questionable whether or not he's going to be able to do anything after November anyways. If he continues with these policies, there's a good chance, you know, that the Democrats will do well in the midterm elections and sees control of at least one House of Congress, probably the House of Representatives. And then it's back to paralysis. They will simply move to impeach this man over and over and over again. And he will be tied up, tied down, nothing he can do. End of his presidency. And in doing so, destroys the possibility of, you know, somebody from, you know, cut from the same piece of ideological cloth continuing these policies. So things like the Gaza technological

miracle, it'll never get off a paper, even if things were going well and things aren't going well. There is no ceasefire. Hamas has not been defeated. Israel is not prevailing. And this is going to go south. And then Yahoo is a politician. He will seek to blame everybody but himself for this. You know, it's a disaster. But we're not allowed to talk about it, you see, because Trump got the FIFA, you know, peace award. Oh, great. He got a peace award for the international soccer. organization right well yeah but it was it was a peace award i mean and you know come on this is don't trump he renamed the jfk center because he's donald trump it's now the trump kennedy center

because don't trump is a cult of personality um and that's where we're at right now we have a literal cult of personality uh where you're you're not allowed to say anything that denigrates or or puts down you know this this larger than life character that now occupies the white house But wait a minute. Wait a minute. The Russiophobes in the State Department and the American Deep State have always said that Russia has a cult of personality around Vladimir Putin. I mean, this is just the world turned upside down, Scotty. Yesterday, I think, was Joseph Stalin's birthday, 147 years old. But there's a poster out there that said, yes, there was a cult. but there was also personality. And, you know, so, yeah, you can say, if you want to say about Putin, there's a cult of personality, yeah. But there's a personality.

There was a man who just the other day spent four and a half hours answering questions from everybody. And he didn't humble once. A cult of personality, though, is more emphasis on the cult. And that's what we have here in the United States. I'm not saying, I mean, everybody who I've spoken to who's a person, actually knows Donald Trump says he's a very personable man. He's actually, you know, he's the kind of guy that you could get along with. He's nice. He cares about you when you're in, and all that. So I'm not here to say that he's the personification of evil, but he is a narcissist, a supreme

narcissist. And he likes the idea of this cult of personality. And he encourages it. And unfortunately, he's surrounded himself with weak people who are not able to just tell him and say, no, boss, that ain't going to happen. That's not, this is, you're setting yourself up for failure. See, he can do no wrong. He says things and he can do no right. He's sort of the American equivalent of Kim Jong-un, who apparently, when he learned how to play golf, went out and played 18 holes and got 18 holes in one because he's Kim Jong-un. What is the future of Americans, America's relationship to Europe? I mean, shouldn't NATO be disbanded? Shouldn't we?

get the hell out of NATO and what do we care about the EU? It's, it's hopeless. Oh, I personally believe the European Union is on the path towards irrelevance. And you will see Europe redefine itself as a collective of sovereign states instead of subordinate nations to this imaginary being called the European Union. NATO likewise is an unsustainable organization. I think that the collapse will come sooner and later and we directly link to what happens in Ukraine. NATO cannot survive.

People tend to forget that NATO had been dealt a fatal blow by Afghanistan and what the United States did to NATO in Afghanistan. We abandoned NATO. Nobody talks about that. How when Trump made the decision and Biden made the decision to get out, they just left the, we actually, the United States went around to Europe and did the old Ten Kupru team saying, raise money to keep your things going, raise money, raise money, oh, yeah, we're out of here, good luck.

And that was a humiliation for NATO. And this is one of the reasons why they immediately turned their eyes on Russia to define Russia as this existential threat, because if they hadn't, and NATO started talking about the reality of the diseased relationship between the United States and Europe, the United States and NATO, which existed even back then, the organization. couldn't survive. So they manufactured a conflict in Ukraine with Russia to justify their continued existence. But now they've literally gotten all in on a losing hand. They're not going to win this. And when Ukraine collapses, that's literally the end of NATO. It will not survive the

collapse of Ukraine. I'm intrigued by the EU silencing this retired Swiss military intelligence officer, Colonel Jacques Baugh. What can you tell us about this? They silenced him, meaning he's not allowed to speak out. He can't travel. They have seized his assets and his bank accounts, and we are told he has no judicial recourse to the seizure. How can that possibly be? Well, because Europe is a dictatorship. I mean, it's a police state in every way, shape, and form. First of all, you know, that would say you have accused him of being a Russian asset of, you know, parroting Russian position. It's just an outright lie. You know, one of the things that, you know, made Jacques Bo what he was was the fact that he used Western research to make the points that he made.

It's just that the conclusions he's reached were uncomfortable for people who were not paying attention to the facts. but this is not this man didn't travel to russia this man didn't appear on russian media outlets he didn't you know meet with russian officials to get the russian perspective um he simply delved into western data to point out the the vacuous nature and reality of western policy which made him in many ways more dangerous than people like me who you know extensively draw upon you know, Russianary expertise and the Russian perspective. He draws upon the West exclusively, and the conclusions he reach are unimpeachable. And therefore, the only way they could deal with this man is to silence him in the most, you know,

I mean, the only other thing that would be worse in this is actually imprisoning him and killing him. But they have literally sought to de-platform him, de-legitimize him, and to destroy him economically. If the Swiss government doesn't do something about this, then let me put it this way. I was, you know, I've just published a book, and it was, it's been put out in Spanish and German and some other European languages as well. And I was supposed to go to Spain and Germany and maybe some other places in March. And when Jacques Bo, when this happened, I received sound legal advice not to go anywhere. near Europe right now. I definitely will never go to the United Kingdom.

I would be arrested on the spot. They would treat me more harshly than they treated George Galloway. And now the notion of me traveling to Europe. You know, I used to go to a Swiss conference every year. Wonderful group of people. I'm not going to Switzerland now. Not because they're doing nothing about Jacques Bo. And if they're going to treat one of their own, a national resource, a national hero like this,

what would they do to an American who has been singled out by, the European Union by the Ukrainians have singling me out for death. I got a bomb threat in the mail the other day. The Post Service has taken it seriously, but I do. And this is the world we live in right now. And Americans need to understand that this is this freedom of speech issue. A lot of people are like, why does J.D. Vance, you know, stick his nose in Europe's business? Because freedom of speech is absolute and universal.

And when you start silencing people anywhere in the world, It resonates globally, especially when you silence a voice of reason, an intelligent voice, a fact-based voice, a voice that has been proven factually correct across the board. It means you're silencing the truth. And when you silence the truth, what's that say about the quality of the life and existence that we collectively lead? Last question. I know you've written extensively about this, but we have just a few minutes left. What is the significance of the Ereschnik? The Eresnik is game set match.

First of all, it's real. A lot of people are saying, well, it's just a bluff. It was an experimental missile. No, the Ereschenik now there is a brigade, I believe. They used to deploy them in regiments, I think, now that's a brigade. But it's still three battalions, three launchers, nine missiles, operational. When I say operational, it just doesn't mean that you've married the missile up with the launcher. That actually took place back in August when the first missile rolled off of the Vodkin's production facility and then was sent to Capustiniar where it married up with the launcher that had been purpose built back in March of this year.

And they put the missile on and then they trained the troops on the technical parameters of the missile, how it operates, how it performs. And then they went through their combat drills. And so they did all of this. And now the unit has been brought up and it's in Belarus in a facility that has. has been repurposed. It's a former SS20 facility back in the INF days that was decommissioned. They brought it back. When I look at the photographs, they've put back the nuclear weapons technical handling area. So this is a brigade that has conventional and nuclear capacity. I believe it's probably a two-to-one ratio, meaning they got three nuclear armed irishonics and six conventionally armed

to Russianics, and the Russians are going to be doing similar things. The West has nothing that can come close to the capabilities of this system, and this system allows Russia the ability to do strategic escalation in a non-nuclear fashion, meaning that they can fire these missiles, that can reach out and touch anywhere they want in Europe in response to provocations from the West without automatically triggering a nuclear so it gives Russia even more flexibility. Europe's got nothing that can match this, the missiles in serial production. That means that from August until December, they produced a brigades worth of material.

Okay, so that's August, September, October, November, December 5th. They're going to have two or three brigades coming out a year. And, you know, they will do this for as long as it takes. And next thing you know, there's going to be 300 of these missiles. and there's nothing. We have the Dark Eagle, and as I already said about China, the Dark Eagle, if it's deployed to Germany, can do nothing. It's got this tiny little warhead that they don't even know if it works.

They've been so much time trying to get the Dark Eagle to actually leave the launcher and then fly like it's supposed to. You know, it can go Mach 4 or Mach 5. The Erescent comes in at Mach 10 or 11, just to understand that. But in order to do this, they know. never focused on actually what the kinetic strike capacity is, what damage is done. They don't know if the warhead of the Dark Eagle can accomplish the military tasks that it's been assigned.

That's our best. And they're going up against the Russians. We have the Arrachshnik. And now, you know, the Russians are talking about a Russianic 2.0. That's the next one. And they're talking about other systems, a Russianik-like. They're going to be flooding the, you know, just flooding the field with these new, intermediate range missiles that give them conventional overmatch in Europe.

When Putin says that he will destroy Europe, it's not necessarily through nuclear weapons. Russia is developing the capability to destroy Europe conventionally. Wow. Scotty, we have to go. Christmas is upon us. I know you're doing some traveling and we'll be off unless there's major developments that require we come on for 10 days. leading up to resuming on January 5th, which is two weeks from today. Maverick is happy that we'll be off. This year, judging freedom for the second year in a row,

exceeded 100 million views. You are the most popular guest on the program, and I can't, of course, thank you enough. We have become very good friends. We've traveled together. We've collaborated on projects. You're a great human being. I value deeply our professional relationship and our personal friendship, and I thank you for it.

Well, I thank you very much. I share the same sentiment, and as good as this year was, and this was a pretty exciting year, I think next year is going to be even better. And hopefully it's better in terms of heading towards better outcomes. But I look forward to working with you in the year to come. Thank you, Scott. All the best to you. Safe travels. Merry Christmas to you and your family. Thank you. Merry Christmas. Thank you. A busy day tomorrow. I'm not even going to give you the times, but it's virtually every hour, with the exception of 9 a.m. and noon.

Ambassador Chaz Freeman, Pepe Escobar, Professor Jeffrey Sachs, Aaron Mate, Matt Ho, Colonel Karen Koukowski, Max Blumenthal. We'll see you tomorrow. Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom. Thank you.