Judging Freedom - Scott Ritter : Will Trump Nuke Iran?

Episode Date: June 30, 2025

Scott Ritter : Will Trump Nuke Iran?See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

. Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Monday, June 30th, 2025. Scott Ritter will be here with us in just a moment on, will Donald Trump use nuclear weapons on Iran? But first this. We all know how devastating war is. Lives lost, communities destroyed. But war can also threaten your financial freedom. That's where America's heading.

Our growing involvement in global conflicts. It means more spending, more debt, and a weaker dollar. That's a direct hit to your wallet. So here are three things to keep your eyes on. Exploding debt, declining dollar, rising prices of gold and silver. These things are already happening. Goldman Sachs predicts gold could hit $4,500 an ounce by 2026. Why? Because central banks and smart investors are buying gold hand over fist. They know what's coming and

they're hedging against it. Currency collapse, inflation and market volatility. Gold has been a trusted store of value for thousands of years. And today we need that protection more than ever. Call Lear Capital now at 800-511-4620 or visit learjudsnap.com. No one is going to protect your wealth for you. You need to do it yourself. And now is the time. Scott Ritter, welcome here, my dear friend. Before we get to what Donald Trump might do,

I want to talk with you for a few minutes about what Donald Trump did do. He continues to maintain, as recently as yesterday, on Fox Business Channel with Maria Bartiromo that the bombs that he dropped two Saturday nights ago totally obliterated Iran's nuclear facilities. His secretary of defense has repeated that mantra. Is there any evidentiary basis to make these claims? There's a circumstantial evidence, meaning that you know, according to Pete Hegseth on the Fordow facility, it's been studied now over the course of many years by two DARPA scientists who, you know, have postulated a theoretical

scenario involving ventilation shafts and the precision application of GBU-57 bombs that could hypothetically produce a result that in theory could have caused collapse or thermal destruction of centrifuges contained inside the Fordo facility. So the B2s dropped. The requisite number of bombs, photographic imagery shows the bombs landed approximately where they're supposed to. I mean, according to the president, MP Katz, that, you know, the size of a refrigerator door, I am seeing the evidence to sustain that. But the point is, he doesn't know, because they have no way of knowing what happened inside. There's theories about what could have happened, vibrations, collapse, heat. But they simply don't know what we do know is that the Iranians are in the process of excavating into the facility.

Remember, they filled up the tunnels before the strike. And so they're in the process of gaining access and, you know, whether or not they choose to share what they find with us is their business. But what we do know also is that the president simply doesn't know, has no idea, no way of knowing. He is acting on a theory that was put forward by two scientists. I've dealt with a lot of people who put forward theories.

I've put forward theories. Theories don't always play out. Reality is a tough mistress. And it just doesn't always work out the way you think it's going to. But we also know that there's two other, the big three facilities, Natanz, Fordow, and Isfahan. Natanz had been struck by the Israelis. This is a shallower underground

facility and nobody believed that it could withstand, you know, big bunker busters. This is where the older centrifuges were kept. And it appears that significant damage has been done to the Natanz facility. And if the president wants to take credit for, you know, applying two bombs on top of the numerous bombs that Israel dropped on it, say, obliteration, so be it. One of the most critical facilities in all of Iran is the Isfahan facilities, the nuclear research institutes and such. These are located very far underground, so far that Trump didn't even try to hit them with the bunker busters because they just would have bounced off.

This is where the uranium conversion takes place. This is where you make metal, convert the feedstock once it's enriched to a level that you want. Let's say if it's a weapon over 90%, you turn it into a metal. These weren't touched at all. Trump fired 34 cruise missiles against surface targets, but the critical infrastructure deep inside wasn't touched,

wasn't impacted. Nobody even tried because you can't get to it. So now we take this critical conversion facility with the ability to make the metal. And we note the following 400 kilograms of uranium hexafluoride enriched to 60% is missing and nobody knows where it is. The Iranians said they secured it and it wasn't impacted by the strikes. And there's no reason to contradict that. We know that since January, February of 2021, Iran has been producing centrifuges that are no longer accounted for by the International Atomic Energy Agency

because Donald Trump withdrew from the JCPOA in which accounting for centrifuges was one of the critical aspects of monitoring. And because we withdrew and because we encouraged the European nations not to engage in the required economic interaction that the agreement said, the Iranians followed through engage in the required economic interaction that the agreement said, the Iranians followed through with what the agreement allows.

If one or more parties are not abiding by what the JCPOA says, then the other parties are not held to their commitments. And so Iran said, we're no longer bound by this. And they began to withdraw in 2021. They stopped letting people count for the centrifuges. You can build a lot of centrifuges in four years. Iran has over a dozen buried sites around Iran, similar to Fordow, that easily could be converted. In fact, they were in the process of declaring a third uranium conversion facility when the bombing took place. My point is there's nothing stopping the Iranians from building advanced centrifuge

cascades in other locations now undeclared because they don't trust the IA because the IA spied on Iran on behalf of Israel and the United States providing critical information was used to destroy facilities and assassinate scientists. So we don't know where the centrifuges are. They can easily build them. We don't know where the already enriched material is and let's say the Iranians did enrich it up to over 90% The facility that converts it into metal they can be using the weapon is a hundred meters underground untouched So Donald Trump doesn't know what he's talking about or he does and he's simply lying to the American people in bluster But there's no professional in the world that would say that Iran's nuclear program has been totally destroyed.

The evidence, in fact, directly contradicts that assertion. I note that General Kean, the Air Force four star, who's the current chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff would not say that, but the very, very political and very, very sycophant like Secretary of Defense did mouth what the president said. But I've got to believe, and I think this is dangerous, Scott, when they say something as if it is historical fact and they do not have evidence for it, and it's basically PR bluster, and it could affect human lives, and it could provoke Trump to do something else

about which we'll talk in a few minutes. Was Iran weeks away from developing a bomb as Trump also said yesterday on Fox? Here's Iran's weak spot in this entire, you know, adventure. I wrote an article, published in Consortium News last October, where I said Iran already has the bomb, they just haven't built it. You see, because there's no reason for Iran to enrich uranium to 62%, none whatsoever, except according to the Iranians, to have leverage to get the United States to come back to the negotiating table is it to say,

if you don't come back or if you attack us, we could go forward. That makes them a threshold state. Then you have the words of the Iranian officials themselves that condemn them. They said, the Iranians said, we're weeks away. If we wanted to and a decision was made, we're weeks away from being able to produce a nuclear bomb

So the answer is yes Iran was weeks away if a political decision had been made but countering against that is the fact that the Iranians since April had been involved in negotiations where They were in negotiating good faith to eliminate all of the concerns, to turn over the 60%, to get rid of excess enrichment, to allow American inspectors and to sign a treaty saying that they will never go back on their declaration. So if you want to make the case that Iran was an imminent threat, you can't. You simply can't because the United States was supposedly engaged in good faith negotiations with the Iranians. But yeah, technically speaking, I always told the Iranians and I say it to this day, you don't wave a red

cape in front of a bull and then cry when the bull charges. You don't brag about having the potential to produce a nuclear weapon within weeks. And they'd be surprised when people say, well, that's unacceptable. We may attack. Who prevailed, if you can use that word, who had the better outcome, maybe is a more apt phrase, in the 12-day war between Iran and Israel? I put it as a rough draw. Since Iran still contends that it doesn't plan on producing a nuclear weapon, they went through a lot of effort to create a threshold capability that would never be manifested. Even though they theoretically held on to this threshold capability, since they don't

plan on having a nuclear weapon. You know, what was the purpose? What was the sense over 900 people dead? Um, 102, uh, women, uh, you know, women, 32 children, some of the women were pregnant, I mean, we're talking about, you know, a lot of people dying for this. Um, so, you know, but what Iran did show is that it can strike Israel. Uh, the Israelis haven't been forthcoming about their losses because they can't be, according to Channel 13 in Israel. We are talking massive losses.

Now, I don't know if any of that can be verified, but Israel itself hasn't opened up and said, remember last time when the Iranians attacked the Vatam airfield with the days we had camera crews out there saying, OK, they hit here here, but they didn't do anything. Ain't no camera crews going to any of the Israeli air bases right now for a reason. Just like there's no camera crews allowed to roam Tel Aviv and take a look at the strategic facilities that were struck, Iran hit Israel hard. Now Israel showed that it is capable of reaching out and touching the Iranians, but it was Israel after 12 days that was begging for a ceasefire, and it was the United States that desperately went

through this active theater at the end. The attack that Trump says obliterated the Iranian nuclear, we warned the Iranians in advance. We warned them in advance. Their counter-strike, they warned us in advance. This is where we're gonna strike. This is how many missiles, please evacuate. We don't want to kill anybody. The end of this war was theater, a theatric so that people could say, okay, everybody did what they need to do. Now we're going to end

the war. And that theater was brought on by Israel, which was severely hurt by all of this. They don't want to talk about it. They're broadcasting as if they've somehow come out of this ahead. You know, the Iranians have been far more open about their losses, their casualties, and the Iranians say we're ready to do this again. So even though it's a rough draw, these are two punch-drunk fighters that went to their respective corners. If they want to come out and answer the bell, advantage Iran. advantage Iran here's David Barnea the head of Masad apparently speaking to a group of Masad and CIA agents thanking the CIA for helping coordinate the attack on Iran's goes out and for about two minutes but it's very telling I've never seen this guy make statements of this specificity

and identifying without using a name but by his title the Mossad asset who happens to be the director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Chris, cut number six. I also want to express appreciation and gratitude to our main partner, the CIA, for the joint operations and the missions that were carried out, and also to the head of the CIA, who supported the Mossad in making the right decisions, which ultimately made this operation possible. We will continue to keep a very close watch on all the projects in Iran, which we know in the most thorough way, and we will be there just as we have been until now. But we must not forget that there are still 50 hostages in the Gaza Strip,

30 deceased, 20 living hostages, whom it is our moral and ethical duty to bring back to our border. I want to thank you all again and to tell you that you are part of history, an unforgettable and inseparable part of what the Mossad has done and continues to do. Continue working shoulder to shoulder with our partners in the IDF and the Shin Bet, and in this way we will keep bringing great achievements to the people of Israel. So thank you all very much. Well done, truly well done. Israel is in a shambles and he's saying truly well done. Well, what do you think of that,

Scott? I agree with him. Well done. I mean, I don't agree with his cause or anything else, but what they accomplished was phenomenal. They, over the course of 10 plus years, apparently together with the CIA, they built a massive organization inside Iran, sustained it, that was able to establish warehouse-sized drones that were capable of assembling drones and then disseminating these drones in operational cells throughout Iran and position them to have a decisive impact

against Iran in air defense, to assassinate senior Iranian leadership, to take out ballistic missiles. Well done. I mean, my God, if I were carrying out an operation of this nature, I would want those results. Now, I would also wanna protect my assets. The Mossad has abandoned nearly a thousand of its agents now to be hung by the neck until dead

because they recruited throwaway assets. They recruited Afghans, Indians, Pakistanis, poor Iranians. It's a typical model people need to know. And hopefully, they've learned now that if you get recruited by Mossad or CIA to operate inside Iran, you are a disposable asset. You will be arrested, and you will be hung, and nobody's going to come and rescue you.

But be that as it may, the Mossad accomplished a great thing. Now, whether they can replicate this down the road, I don't know. But I think it is interesting, you know, the linkage he's made with the CIA. You know, the CIA for the longest time had what something called the Iran Mission Center, which was created to do just this kind of operation. The Iran Mission Center, my understanding is dissolved because a decision was made during the Biden administration that we weren't going to go to war with Iran and the Iran Mission Center was about war. But the Near East Division of the CIA's Operation Wing, their Iran desk, they maintained all the contacts,

they maintained everything they've done, and they've maintained the liaison with the Israelis. So the US is capable of providing a tremendous amount of material support. If you remember, Stukneks was the virus that was inserted into the Natanz centrifuge facility. That was a joint US-Israeli operation. The Israelis went rogue in the end, but it was developed and maintained, monitored by the United States. You have to know and have to believe

that there are scores of operations of this sort that have been conceived and may have been implemented and some of which may still be held in reserve for any future activities. So, you know, yeah, well done, Mossad. It doesn't mean I support what they're doing, but hey, you got to call a win a win. I mean, if the Yankees are paying Boston, I'm a Yankees fan, but a Boston slugger comes up in the ninth inning and knocks one over the center. You got to say, well done. I don't like the outcome, but well done. Did any Mossad agents lose their lives or get captured by the Iranians? Israeli Mossad agents, not the people that they hired as intermediaries?

If they have, they haven't been, they haven't been. It's very rare that Israel have a case officer inside Iran. There was evidence that Israeli special forces, and it could have included some paramilitaries from Assad, were operating on the ground inside Iran on the first night or so carrying out direct action operations using special missiles designed for that purpose. These are primarily for the Saudi at Matkal, Shagdall and some other special operations

unit maybe Mossad's version of ground branch. But it doesn't appear that any of them were captured. They were all extricated. Generally speaking, the Mossad agents will be operating either, there's a huge CIA base in Azerbaijan that runs operations of this nature and was heavily involved in this effort. The Mossad is working with them probably in an offsite shared facility. Same thing in Kurdistan up in Erbil. There's a huge Mossad presence working with the CIA again to project force force into, into Northern Iran, out of Kurdistan.

And there's every reason to believe that there's a similar CIA, Mossad base in Pakistan, working the Baloch front. So that's where your case officers will be on the outside looking in, as opposed to be on the ground running things. What will Netanyahu expect Trump to do next? to be on the ground running things. What will Netanyahu expect Trump to do next? It all depends on what Trump has signed off on. I personally believe that Trump has signed off on regime change in Iran is his primary objective and everything else is just a subterfuge and the

Iranians should treat it as such. There will be no diplomacy with the United States. the Iranians should treat it as such. There will be no diplomacy with the United States. This talk of Witkoff going in and opening up the $30 billion. Well, Trump has already said that's nonsense. But even if it wasn't, you can't believe anything. Trump has already been exposed as a liar. I mean, the American people have to say,

quit high-fiving yourself saying, hey, that's cool. Trump lured him. That's the American president of the United States has now been exposed globally as a liar straight-up liar. Can't trust them Diplomacy in america means nothing. It's a subterfuge. Nobody can trust anything sign a treaty with america. Doesn't matter. We won't abide by it Um, so stop high-fiving yourselves and understand this has done critical damage to the reputation of the united states Uh, but the bottom line is I believe that don Donald Trump is committed to a policy of regime change. He would like to have the nuclear program eliminated using regime change and the things that can happen there as opposed to direct military force.

But he's boxed himself into a corner here. Because what happens when it emerges that, you know, we know that the Isfahan is intact, and Iran is not giving it up. It may turn out that Firdot is intact and therefore the best conventional strike capacity of America, DARPA's best minds didn't do what they were supposed to do. And the Tons wasn't, it was, the reason why they built for Firdot is they knew the Tons was going to be destroyed. So the Tons did what the Tons wasn't, it was, it was the reason why they built for, for those, they knew the Tons was going to be destroyed. So the Tons did when the Tons was going to do, but now there's a third facility that can be opened up to replace the Tons.

Now you have a nuclear enrichment program that Trump says will never be allowed to exist. What do you do? Well, what is he going to do? Do you think he'll be tempted to use nuclear weapons on Iran? Yes. The fact of the matter is the only way you take out, there's only two ways to take out the Iranian nuclear program.

One is that the Iranians do it voluntarily. So you have regime change and the new regime says we will turn everything over to the IAEA and you get rid of it that way. The other way is using nuclear weapons. And there is a war plan in place that's already been designed to do this. Back when Trump was talking about attacking Iran in his first term, he was told that our conventional munitions can't do this. That if you want to take out these nuclear programs, you've got to use nuclear weapons. And a new nuclear employment plan was developed that has nuclear weapons

available to target these facilities. And so I think Trump will probably go into a longer regime change game right now. But if that doesn't work, if it fails, then Trump may have no choice but to either reverse course. Obama did it. I just want to tell everybody, you don't always have to go to war. Barack Obama had promised to go to war if Iran wouldn't give up its enrichment program and ended up negotiating the JCPOA instead. But if Trump's not willing to find a negotiated outlet and he insists on the elimination of an enrichment program Iran won't allow to be eliminated, then the fact of the matter

is the only choice he has, the only weapon he has that can accomplish that is a nuclear weapon. He must know by now that the bluster he articulated as recently as yesterday and the sycophant-like bluster that comes out of the mouth of his Secretary of Defense is profoundly erroneous. He must know that what happened two Saturday nights ago utterly failed to do what he now has claimed it did. Do you think they are contemplating something greater, harsher, more catastrophic and with utter disregard for

human life? I believe they're capable of doing that. Whether or not they're going to jump from A to Z is another question. I do believe there are rational voices in the Trump administration that would try to mitigate against that kind of outcome. But the bottom line is Trump has boxed himself in. He has insisted on zero enrichment. He's insisted that the Iranian government,

you know, give up this capability. Iran has said we will never give up. And he has said that the Khamenei has to go. I mean, he is talking about regime change. So I believe that's the direction that he's headed. I think right now there are people who might be saying that you have to build a better case for war.

One of those cases might be what I call the inspection trap. That is, now that the IAEA has been disgraced and shown to be little more than a espionage front for the United States and Israel, Iran says they're not welcome back in. And so you might see the United States trying to lead the charge to get the return of the inspectors and make the case that if inspectors aren't allowed back in, then we have to assume that Iran is building a nuclear weapon.

Therefore we have no choice but to move in with massive strength. And look, we just, DARPA spent two years, according to peak head Seth, with their two scientists to come up with this strike option against Fordo. And if it didn't work, what other options do you have? You know what I'm saying? The DARPA is a advanced research projects agency. It's sort of this, it's an organization

that does advanced technology technology, etc. And they're they have some of the best minds in America. And to DARPA scientists, according to Pete Hegseth, they've been evaluating the Fordo facility for for many years, coming up with this strike plan to put, you know, this many GBU 57 through a refrigerator door size target to destroy Fordham. This is the sort of cartoon that he played at one of his press conferences created

by these scientists is what they hoped and expected and think would happen. But of course, they have no idea if it did. Correct. And just so you know, Theodore Postle, who's an MIT arms control specialist who's been reviewing nonsense like this for years, has already debunked the DARPA scientist theory.

He's gone through the science of the strike, looking at the geology, et cetera. And he contends that these bombs wouldn't even come close to making the penetration necessary to achieve the outcome that Hegseth is crowing about. What do you think will happen next? I mean, Netanyahu's on the ropes domestically, legally. Israel is in shambles. Trump is caught in a lie.

Sounds to me like they're going to take us to war. That's the path we're on. It doesn't mean that's always the outcome you're going to get. There's a lot of variables in here. I mean, you saw Trump's panicked social media posting about Benjamin Netanyahu's legal problems. You know, Bibi's in a lot of trouble and we don't know what the outcome of that will be. If the Israelis had received the damage that their own Channel 13 and others are talking about, Israel is not ready to begin attacks again.

If they haven't received the damage, then Israel can do a rapid turnaround. We have a lot of airplanes flying in with a lot of munitions so they can reload that. I think the critical thing here is Trump's domestic political reality. If there's enough voices within MAGA who are speaking out against the possibility of war, Trump

may have to have a second thought. But there's a lot of voices yelling before the bombing. It seems to me that the voices have somewhat dissipated because they are loathe to be seen as being unpatriotic or anti-American. And that's the genius of the propagandist approach taken by Hegseth and Trump to loudly crow about an outcome they can't demonstrate, but then to say anybody who doesn't support this is unpatriotic, not supporting the brave pilots, not supporting the two DARPA scientists,

these wonderful people who made this all possible in theory. And I see that, and I'm fearful that the domestic opposition that could stop a war isn't manifesting itself. And so unless something else happens, and that's always a possibility, I'm afraid that we are on a, um, weeks or month long path towards, uh, the potential of nuclear weapons being used against Iran. Uh, the Trump I believe will make a play for regime change together with the Israelis, um, and that will fail.

change together with the Israelis and that will fail and then when that fails and the Iranians don't allow IEA inspectors back in, I think you're going to see Russia and China putting pressure on Iran to allow them back in to try and prevent this very outcome. But if Iran says no, they spied on us. Judge, let me just give you a quick background. When I was a weapons inspector in Iraq, we installed a camera monitoring facility, a system, to all of Iraq's industrial infrastructure that had the capability of producing things that could be used in weapons of mass destruction. These cameras were in place and were directly fed into US Central Command and the CIA,

who picked the targets, the timing, and everything. These cameras are supposed to be used for arms control monitoring, but instead were used for targeting by the United States military, United States intelligence service. The IEA did the same thing. They have their cameras in there. That camera information was fed to the Israelis and to the United States and was used for targeting purposes. The visits of the IAEA gave away targeting information. Grossi met with Israeli officials and handed this over. He allowed his inspectors to meet with Israeli intelligence

officers to share information, to take taskings from the Israelis to go back into Iran and pick out specific things. The IAEA is 100% a corrupt institution that can never be trusted again to carry out safeguards agreements. And until it's reformed, Iran would be lunatic to allow them back in. Wow. Scott Ritter, thank you, my dear friend. would be lunatic to allow them back in. Wow. Scott Ritter, thank you, my dear friend.

These are not happy stories, and who knows how it's going to end. But your analysis is extraordinary and deeply appreciated. All the best. Thanks for having me. Sure. We'll see you again soon, Scott. Coming up on all of this at 4 o'clock this afternoon,

Professor Jeffrey Sachs, Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom. MUSIC