Judging Freedom - Scott Ritter : FREE Speech & Me - I've been de-Banked!

Episode Date: January 16, 2026

Scott Ritter : FREE Speech & Me - I've been de-Banked!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? the government? What if 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 Friday, January 16th, 2006, our dear friend and colleague, Scott Ritter, joins us now. Scott, I want to talk to you at some length about what has been happening in the streets of Iran and what may very well be a coming new relationship between the United States and Russia. But before we get there, you were subjected to what Marie Stan's, Secretary of Commerce in the Nixon administration, once called the terrorists of justice, the government doing whatever the hell it wants to do to somebody without any justice whatsoever. What happened to you the other day when you tried to use your regular bank card to put gas in your car? Look, I think, gosh, I've lost track of time. But I took my

wife out to dinner the night before the incident in question. And the card worked fine. Paid dinner gave a nice tip on the way home the yellow light in my car dinged off you know the one that says you got to put low fuel you got to put gas in it don't worry about honey i'll take care of it in the morning why not i have a debit card that works i mean we have money in the bank this is the digital economy that we've uh we've grown accustomed to um no cash in the wallet no cash at home all the money in the bank uh so next morning i drove my wife to work and i went to the gas station to to fill up the tank and tried to use the card and it got declined. And so I called my wife and I said, hey, we make a mistake. Did we run out of money and checking? Do we need to transfer money from

savings? She said, no. We've got plenty of money in checking. I said, well, could you just double check? And she went on the online banking app, Citizens Bank, 20 year relationship, 26 year relationship, and all of our accounts were zeroed out. We had no money, not just in our checking our savings, but in our joint accounts with our daughters, because as good parents, we kept joint accounts there in case our kids ever called us up and said, hey, mommy, daddy, we need help. And we wanted to be in a position to say, instantly, here's the help. So they zeroed those out too. In total, around $2,500. For all the people to think Scott Ritter's rich, there's the evidence. Twenty-five hundred bucks is what I had in my...

What did you learn made this happen? Well, I immediately called the local, our bank managers, who we have good relationships, and they said, we have no idea what happened. And I said, well, we need to find out. So we started bumping up the chain of command. The first thing we found out is corporate would not talk to us. The corporate said, we have no legal obligation to talk to. And I said, you most certainly do. And they said, we most certainly don't. And I pushed the issue, and the manager backed me up. And what we found out, they said, look, we sent a letter to you. And so I went back through the mail.

And sure enough, the day before in a stack of, you know, mail that we hadn't quite gone through yet was a letter from Citizens Bank that said, we have decided to end our banking relationship with you. And we have taken all your money and we will issue you a cashier's check in, you know, 10 to 14 days time. And then, I mean, literally, it says, citizens is under no obligation to disclose to its reasons for closing the accounts. And at this time, citizens policy prevents disclosure of any information concerning the decision to close the account. Again, I didn't accept that, so I pushed and made a series of phone calls. It finally got citizens to tell us who did this. And it was, you know, a priority investigations unit within their fraud department that, only responds to input from the federal government.

And the input that they respond to are called suspicious activity reports. And I asked the local bank manager, did you submit any suspicious activity reports? And she said, no, there's nothing you do that's suspicious. You coordinate with us on everything. I said, that's right. And so it turns out that somebody in the U.S. government triggered Citizens Bank at least three times with suspicious activity ports. And then what happens is you automatically get designated as a high-risk client.

And then under the, you know, every time when you open up your bank account, you know, that thick pad of paper that they print out and they open up the last page, they sign here. Well, in there in the small print says that citizens or any bank can terminate your account at any time if you're deemed to be a bad investment risk. And if you get designated as a high-risk client because of, suspicious activities report they automatically debank you and this is by design the house judiciary report when going through the january 6th how the u.s government targeted them um said this is used

all the time by the FBI all the time when they don't like you they simply go in and go ding ding ding ding algorithm click you are debanked it's a tactic that has been used i think the uh us government had the The Biden administration had a code date for choke point. And it's just a standard tactic that's been used forever by the United States government to harass anybody who dares do things that the U.S. government's not happy about. You see, it's not about me breaking the law. If I broke the law, FBI guys be coming through my door, they'd seize my accounts, not they'd freeze them, seize them.

I wouldn't get the money back because it's bad money. That's not what they did. what they did is simply abuse a loophole and a law written by Congress. And Congress has acknowledged there's nothing they can do about it. Literally nothing. They call the FBI and the FBI says, we didn't do anything. And the bank said, we can't talk to you because you wrote the law and said, when a suspicious activity report is filed, we don't tell anybody a specific.

Well, a suspicious activity report can be filed for no reason at all. It can be absolute BS. Do we know who filed this? Federal government. That's the true. We don't know who in the federal government did it. I have reason to believe that it's the FBI because the National Security Division of the FBI

has declared war against me since 1995 and has gone on record saying they are going to destroy me and my family. And so I have every reason to believe that they're continuing to live up to this threat. Are the FBI agents who threatened you 10 or 12 years ago and threatened your wife, still in the FBI? No, Michael Templeton, I just want to say his name there for everybody.

Michael Templeton, the man who physically assaulted my wife and verbally assaulted my wife, threatening her with physical violence, threatening me with physical violence. He is retired. But, you know, the FBI is a, it's an organized crime syndicate. And they, the criminal activity that was done 12 years ago carries for today. I am convinced somewhere in the FBI is a file that says, you know, haunt ridder today. And when I say haunt, that's not the word that I mean to use. Right.

Because you're going to use was said to me in person. Right. We will haunt you for the rest of your life. I was told that. He didn't say haunt. They used a common word, which was. We don't say an air that starts with F. We all know what you're talking about.

Why do they haunt you? Because of your exercise of the freedom of speech, because you're intellectually honest, because you're not afraid to call something as you see it. It's more than that, though. Again, I'm not bragging or anything, but I used to be inside the system. Right.

And I was considered a superstar. I mean, as a captain in the Marine Corps, junior captain, I had two classified accommodations from the director of CIA for doing strategically nationally important work. The President of the United States knew my name. The commandant of the Marine Corps loved me, and I was being groomed for bigger and better things. I made the decision in 1991 that I didn't want to go down that path. I had experienced, you know, disarmament and realized that maybe stopping nuclear war is better than planning nuclear war. and I had gone to war in Iraq, and I realized that there had to be better ways of resolving problems between nations than simply killing people. And I said, no, thank you.

The CIA at that point time, John Byrd, he's dead, so we can't hold him accountable. He declared me to be an enemy of the state, and he wrote letters that were put in files everywhere that followed me forever, that anytime somebody said, hey, what about Ritter? They go, oh, no, no, no, he's an enemy of the state. And then I was brought back into the system as a weapons inspector. It was a difficult process. But the CIA found John Byrd's letters and said, no, Ritter's clean. So they brought me back in. I'm at the White House.

I'm at the Pentagon. I'm at the State Department on the seventh floor. I'm everywhere. And I'm at the heart of this. And I decided that I was going to walk away because it was corrupt, because they were telling lies because it wasn't the right thing. And I was told, you can't walk away.

You're on the inside. You've seen it. You know it. You know too much. And we can't let you walk away and speak out. This is our well as well. Oh, but they said if they let me walk away and speak out, a precedent would be set for other people of integrity and say,

oh, you guys are lying, cheating, stealing. I'm going to call you out. You know why there aren't? You know why we need whistleblower protections? Because people tell us. the truth are destroyed by the government. And I said, I'm going to walk away and tell the truth. And that's when the CIA station chief in New York City, Larry Sanchez, I'm giving you guys names here, told me straight up. The FBI has told me that if you walk away, they will haunt you for the rest of

your life. And it will be immediately, and it will be designed to destroy you. You are not allowed to walk away and talk. And if you choose to do that, the United States government, will destroy you. And Larry Sanchez was a friend of mine. And he put out his hand and he said, I like you, but this is the last time we're ever going to be able to talk. Is he still on the CIA? No. Again, we're talking a long time ago. He's long retired. Okay. Here is a clip from Jonathan Greenblatt, who's the chief executive officer of the Anti-Defamation League, reminding you and me and everybody watching us now that they monitor everything we say and they report what they want to report.

This is rather chilling, but we need to run it. Chris, cut number 12. We have a whole apparatus. I have 40 analysts working full-time, seven days a week, 24 hours a day, monitoring extremists. We monitor them online, social media, messaging apps, video games, cryptocurrency, podcasts. short-form video, Wikipedia, LLMs.

We monitor these people and we share the intelligence with the FBI. You saw last month, you heard about the thing that happened at Wilshire Boulevard Temple. Our analysts investigated what happened. They said they were Koreatown for Palestine, this group people. They weren't. We were able to ascertain they were from a group called the Turtle Island Liberation Front. Turtle Island is how left-wing activists refer to the United States. On Monday, December the 15th, this is going to ring a bell.

Cash Patel announced they cracked a terror ring where they arrested four people who were playing New Year's Eve bombings, Turtle Island Liberation Front. So we're monitoring left-wing radicals like the DSA and the anti-war crazies and the pro-Palestine crazies. We're monitoring right-wing extremists, like white supremacists, our militia groups. We're monitoring political Islamists and Christian nationals, all of them. And then we train.

We're the largest trainer of law enforcement in America, extremism, hate. We train 20,000 officers every year. Financed by the American Zionists by the Mossad, which, of course, is financed by the U.S. Treasury. Yeah, you know, normally, and I mean, I don't change my stripes, but normally I tell Greenblank, bring it on bring it on you want to mess with this american i'll kick your ass but as my wife reminded me my big mouth gets me in trouble and when it gets me in trouble it brings harm to her and it brings harm to my kids she said something that resonated you know because i married her in 1991 and you know when you get on your knee and you're proposed to a woman you're promising a better life

you're saying this is going to be a great life join me on this grand journey And she said, every day of our life, you have been at war with the U.S. government, every day of our life. And we have never enjoyed a moment of peace. And that hurt. We've been married 34 years. And I would have thought that our third, I mean, you know, of course we've had good times, but I would have hoped that the 34 years should be going, wow, I look back and we've had such a wonder. No, she said, every day has been hell because of what the U.S. government is doing to you, to me, to our kids.

So, yeah, I'm still stupid, and I'm going to tell Greenland bring it on, but they brought it on, Judge. And I have to tell you, being debanked, if you want to know what true panic is like, get debanked. get debanked and have no money and have an empty gas tank and have an empty refrigerator and have bills piling up and no recourse and you know see how that feels and then have a wife look at you going what have you done and have kids call up going hey what's going on um you know it's not a good feeling and that's the whole purpose of this the whole purpose is to demoralize me it worked for a little while to get me to quit.

That's not going to happen. But I mean, you have to be honest, you know, I thought about it. When my wife told me that, it was like, that's a wake-up call. You're just going, that's the legacy of our relationship, a living hell because of what the government's done to our family. This is why they do it. And so I just want to give a warning to everybody out there. They can do it to you at any time, any time. any time. And it's not about you breaking the law. It's about you going against the grain of people

like Greenblatt, who's not an elected official, who is not a law enforcement officer, who has no constitutional authority whatsoever, but because of the control that the Zionist entity has over America is able to pick up the phone, contact the FBI, and initiate a law enforcement investigation against you. All right. Before we get to your understanding of what's happening Iran. Last question. You're getting the money back that they seized? Well, they say, they say they'll give me, they'll send me a cashier's check in 14 days. Meanwhile, I had to jump through the hoops and make phone calls and everything. I got a new bank account. Don't shut it down in the government, please. And we were able to get our mid-month payments,

my wife's payment and the invoices that I had out there deposited. So we're alive and we're well and we're living and we're functioning. But again, for a period of, you know, two to three days, it was not, it was not good. And we were lucky. You know, other people may not be so lucky. Don't allow the government to do this. What happened in the streets in Iran this week? Look, Iran has significant economic problems, and the Iranian government has not been up to the task of fulfilling its promises to the Iranian people. And so there were legitimate demonstrations about the state of the economy. One of the reasons that triggered these demonstrations was outside interference in the Iranian currency. things were done to deliberately crash the Iranian currency.

And it was done on purpose by outside actors. And then legitimate demonstrators went to the streets. And initially, when these demonstrations went to, there was no violence. You know, the president of Iran actually walked side by side with many of these demonstrators. He says, I'm with you. I understand this. We need to do a better job. But then what happened about day two of the demonstrations, radicals took over.

And they pushed the peaceful people out of the streets. and they began launching violent attacks. These radicals are Mossad-controlled cells that have been in place for a long time inside Iran, equipped, trained by the Mossad to carry out extreme acts of violence. And these cells began to run rampant. They killed over 100 Iranian cops. Now, for all the, you know, Maga, America, could you imagine a scenario where outside agitators started running rampant in American streets and killed a hundred. American cops, what our response would be. And, you know, the goal was to create this massive unrest.

And this is part of a master plan that had been worked out between Trump and Benjamin Niddiahou back in Mar-a-Lago. And then the United States and Israel were supposed to bomb. And when they bond, they're supposed to decapitate the leadership. They were supposed to suppress the ability of the security services to interfere with the violent demonstrations. And this would lead to a revolution that would caused the collapse the Iranian government, and then the son of the former Shah Pahlavi was supposed to come in and become anointed king of Iran. This didn't work because for whatever reason, the United States wasn't ready to bomb. And by the time Trump said, we're going to bomb, the whole thing had been suppressed. The Iranian government had taken control, had suppressed,

and destroyed and defeated the Mossad-backed agents. And when Trump began to initiate the attack the other night. He was told by the Pentagon, don't do this. If you do this, the Iranians are going to hit us back and we can't stop them. They're going to hurt us. We have no way to respond. We're not strong. And the Israelis made the phone call and said, too late, boss, stop. Don't do it. Because if you do it, they're going to hit us and crush us and we can't defend ourselves. The whole idea of the demonstrations and the air attack was to rapidly collapse the Iranian government so they couldn't launch their missiles. But now it's too late. The Iranian government's ready, locked and cocked, and if they get attacked, it will be devastating for the

United States and for Israel. Here's the famous or infamous tweet from Mike Pompeo, former Secretary of State and Director of CIA, and I'm going to guess that on the last line, you agree with them. I'm not going to read all of it, but it says the Iranian regime is in trouble. Bringing in mercenaries is the last best hope. Now to the bottom. Happy New Year to every Iranian in the streets. Ready for this, Scott?

Also to every Mossad agent walking beside them. Why would he say that? Why would he admit to that? They're confident of victory. I mean, this is just a case of arrogance. They actually thought they had a plan. Judge, all you had to see on social media, every pro is rarely bought,

was out there saying the same thing, promoting the same nonsense, creating the same garbage. And the whole idea was to create a sense of inevitability, that would empower the American people to tell Donald Trump, we stand with Iran, bomb Iran, bomb Iran. And Pompeo is part of that system. And Pompeo was simply playing his role.

Here's somebody who's part of that system who is brokenhearted that the United States did not bomb last night. You don't know who this is. Chris, cut number 13. There are a lot of headlines out there that are, in my view, not accurate, President Trump's resolution. It's not the question. The question is, when we do an operation like this, should it be bigger or smaller? I'm in the camp of bigger. Time will tell. I'm hopeful and optimistic that the regime days are numbered.

Compare and contrast that with the giddiness, the cackling of Graham on the air. We're going to bomb them now. We're going to Adam, it's over. Remember that? Just a couple days ago. I love this, Lindsey Graham. I almost feel sorry for him, except I don't. But the fact of the matter is his scheme failed. And, you know, again, I'm not in the support Donald Trump business, but I have to tell you, this was something that was cooked up in Mar-Lago. I mean, Lindsey Graham has admitted. This is something that Netanyahu and Trump cooked up when Netanyahu was visiting Mar-Lago. this was all planned. There was extensive planning going on between the Mossad, the CIA, British intelligence, Dutch intelligence, and every intelligence agency in the world that has been lined up against the Iranians. You know, and yet the United States didn't pull the trigger until it was too late. And I just have to sit there and go,

Trump knew what he was doing. I mean, it seems to me that Trump set up, Lindsey Graham set up, then Yahoo set them all up because they shot their bolt. The the the the Mossad network that was used is gone finished. I mean the Israelis panicked in the end they they when they lost communication with them they tried to shove in a whole bunch of new Starlink you know the communication kits and the Iranians were just sitting there waiting for him to come and go thank you very much thank you you very much because the Iranians broke the code got in there thanks to the rush to Russia the help of Russia by the way so it's all over that entire network's gone

it took decades to build that network up. It's gone. So Graham knows what happened. There is no capacity to, you know, replicate the opportunity that was lost. Now, he's trying to be nice and say, it's not Donald Trump's fault. It's 100% Donald Trump's fault. And you have to ask yourself, was this deliberate? Is it just incompetence?

Which I can also accept, or was this deliberate a setup? So that Netanyahu and Graham, Airbale, stops talking to him about over overthrowing the Iranian regime because they no longer had the tools to do so. One of our chatters writes in, poor Lindsay, he didn't get his war. He didn't get his war. He didn't get his war. We only have a few minutes left. We'll save the conversation about Russia for next week.

But Muhammad Miranda, a good friend of yours and mine, born in the United States, but a professor of the University of Tehran, has given a description of things remarkably similar to yours, who also said the attitude in the streets changed, the last demonstrations he saw of which he was apart, 3 million people in downtown Tehran supporting the government. Yeah, it's a, this just strength, you know, when you talk about Damascus Steel, you know, what makes Damascus Steel so strong is the fact that it's treated in fire over and over and over again, compressed, hardened. And this is what we do to the Iranian government.

I mean, my God, if we want to get rid of the Iranian government, I've said this all along. I mean, I hope the Iranians don't read this wrong. But if I want to break down your government, I want all doors open. I want us doing business with you. I want American business coming in. And I want to expose the Iranian people to the benefits of the West. Now, that's a failed model today.

But the last thing I would want to do is give. them the opportunity to strengthen themselves. And we have done this repeatedly. I remember in 2023, I spoke with the former Iranian president, the one who died in a Raiisi, who died in the helicopter crash in May of 2024. And he talked about the riots that took place in the summer 2023. He said, is the greatest test that the Iranian revolution had gone through since the revolution. And that, you know, for a while there, it was touch and go. But they won. And it it strengthened the nation. The 12-day war last June strengthened Iran. And now this strength, it's Damascus steel, or in this case, we might want to call it Isfahan steel. But they're just making

Iran even stronger and more difficult to crack. And the reality we need to come up with is we have to understand that we keep talking about Iran as a theocracy. And yes, they have the Supreme Leader. And yes, the Shia faith is central to the, you know, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the way that Iran views itself. But it's a functioning democracy. I mean, in some ways, better than our own. Their parliament is democratically elected. Their president is democratically elected. The mechanism that's used to control the supreme leader is democratic, the assembly of experts, is democratically elected. Iran is a democracy. And the will of the people is manifest in this democracy and the Iranian people support this government. I know all the exiles out there,

all the people who fled when the Shah fell will take vehement exception to what I said. But the reality is reflected in what my good friend Mohamed Miranda observed and reported to you and everybody else. Millions of people in the streets demonstrating in support of the government. Could you imagine how an American president would feel if one day in every a major American city that millions of people poured out into the streets in support of him. He'd say, this is amazing. I'm invincible. What do you think the Iranian government's thinking right now?

Right. Just as the attempts by the Israelis and the Americans to weaken the Iran culture has strengthened it, the attempts by dead CIA people, and retired FBI agents to weaken the backbone of Scott Ritter has only strengthened it. Thank you, Scott. Thank you for being who you have been, and thanks for joining us this morning. Next week we'll talk about is the Cold War returning. In the meantime, here are the people you can write to and communicate with.

Paul Tonko, Congressman Paul Tonko is Scott's Congressman. Cash Patel, of course, is the director of the FBI. B.I. Bruce Van Sond is the chair and CEO of Scott's former bank, Citizens Bank. There's the contact information about them as we have it. Scott, thank you very much. Appreciate you coming on at this time of day. I appreciate you being so candid about all this. It's a lesson to everybody. And thanks so much for your analysis about Iran. We'll see you next week, my friend. Thank you. Of course. Coming up at 4 o'clock today on all of this, the intelligence Community Roundtable, Larry Johnson, Ray McGovern. Judge Napolitano for judging freedom.