Judging Freedom - Sen. (Coach) Tommy Tuberville, AL (R) : Why I Oppose Aid to Ukraine

Episode Date: June 11, 2024

Sen. (Coach) Tommy Tuberville, AL (R) : Why I Oppose Aid to UkraineSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Thank you. Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Tuesday, June 11th, 2024. Senator Tommy Tuberville, better known in the state of Alabama as Coach Tuberville of the great Auburn University, joins us now. Senator Tuberville, it's been a pleasure. I've been an admirer of yours for many years. I know how crazy it is, life on Capitol Hill. Thank you for taking the time to chat with me and to a lot of your fans and all the viewers to whom you're now exposed. I very much appreciate you being here. Thank you, Judge.

You've got a lot of fans in Alabama. I hear people talking about you all the time. So it's good to be on and talk about the clown world up here in D.C. I'd much rather be talking about college football or something to do with sports. But unfortunately, we've got a lot of things going on up here in D.C. right now. We do. We do. You've had two marvelous careers. I'm familiar with your career as a football coach because for 10 years, I lectured at the Mises Institute, a well-known libertarian research

and think tank right across the street from the football field. And all those times, hot, sweaty July, I'm giving 10, 12, 15 lectures a week. I'm thinking, why can't I come down here in September and watch Auburn beat the University of Alabama, which you did six times in a row? That is a big deal in Alabama. Well, it's what makes the world go round in the South and especially in Alabama, college football. And now we have great college basketball too. We've got a lot of great sports. But, of course, when it comes to Saturday afternoon in the fall, college football is number one.

And, heck, Judge, I spent almost 40 years in college coaching. I had 25 years as a head coach. I enjoyed every bit of it. And, you know, it's all about organization and teamwork and dedication and have a goal set to get something done. And then I come up here to this world and it's just totally different. There's no teamwork on Capitol Hill. There's a Bible on Capitol Hill.

It's called the Constitution. Every single one of you, your 99 colleagues in the Senate and your 435 colleagues in the House on the other side of the building took the same oath. I took that oath when I became a judge here in New Jersey. Every president from George Washington to Joe Biden has taken that oath. Preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States. Seems that there are so few members of Congress who feel that the Constitution was written to restrain the government. They think it was written to allow them to right any wrong or regulate any behavior or tax any event. Well, Judge, again, being in the sports world, you had to believe in something. You had to have some ideology and understand what you want to do on offense and defense and have a plan and work towards that for 365 days.

It's no different here. We've made it 248 years, this country of ours, because of what you just said, the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and the Bill of Rights. And for some reason, people just look for things to change up here. They don't want to just accept it for what it is. They want to put their mark on it, and we don't need to do that. We just need to give the people of this country a voice,

the American citizens a voice, and they don't have a voice right now, Judge. It's all coming from the elite, all from the people at the top. They control everything, the leadership. It's been very disappointing to me to look at the overall situation. My first day here, by the way, was January the 6th, 2021. And yeah, it was your first day. That was my first day. And, you know, it's we've been in a minority in the Senate since I've been there. I hate playing deep. We've had to play defense. You know, I had to hose on the military flag officers for 10 months, just trying to get them to give me an answer of why they're changing a law without going through Congress with the abortion

travel law in the military. And of course, nobody ever even visit with me. And then all of a sudden the Republicans, my Republican colleagues started coming after me. And I'm thinking, wait a minute, you're supposed to be on my side. We're pro-life as a Republican. But I tell you, it got pretty ugly. And I found out a lot about some people up here about that time. Senator, has the Congress declared war on Russia? Because you might think that listening to Jake Sullivan and Tony Blinken and Joe Biden. Yeah, Twiddle Dee and Twiddle Dum, Blinken and Sullivan Biden. Yeah, twiddle-dee and twiddle-dum, Blinken and Sullivan, that's what I call those two, because they're running the show behind the scenes. President Biden is, I guess, okaying everything. But, you know, Judge, I went to

see Zelensky about three months, four months before the war started. Actually, I went with my old buddy, Lindsey Graham, who doesn't like some things that I've been for or against the last couple of years when it comes to Ukraine. But that being said, you know, they had problems at the time. You know, they were fighting then across the border, but Russia was building up their forces at the border. And Zelensky says, and the generals, by the way, they were all in the meetings that, you know, they're coming. Would y'all give us some help? And of course, we come back and the

Biden administration already knew it, but they didn't want to do anything to stop Putin from coming across the border and trying to take more land and territory. It was going to be, if you remember this, a small incursion. And that's really what it was. They didn't come in to really take a whole lot of things over. They just came in to try to make a point of, listen, you're not going to put these folks in NATO because I do not want military bases from the United States in Ukraine. And on my board- And because George H.W. Bush and Jim Baker and Bill Clinton all said it won't happen. Exactly. We've lied to Russia since, what, 1991 from the Budapest agreements.

And now, listen, a lot of people say, well, Coach is on Putin's side. Listen, I'm not on Putin's side. We know who he is. He's a former KGB. And he does a lot of things that we wouldn't do in this country. But we also have to understand, too, Judge, and you're in my lifetime, and I've done a lot of reading about this in the last three and a half years, is that, you know, we've tried to overthrow, the United States of America has tried to overthrow 60 different governments.

And we did that, as you well know, with Ukraine a few years ago. The CIA went in and put Zelensky in and took the old president out. And it's all gone downhill from there when it comes to Putin. Senator, here's two very interesting clips of you questioning Secretary Austin. He seems very hesitant in his answers, and you were very forceful and forthright in your questions. We'll play them back to back. Chris cuts 15 and 16. General, can Ukraine win? Yes, yes. What does that look like? Well, what we've said all along is we want to see Ukraine remain a sovereign, independent,

democratic state that has the ability to defend its sovereign territory and deter aggression. Do we have 12 CIA bases in Ukraine? Can you answer that in this setting? CIA bases? I got this out of the New York Times, which I don't read very often. I'll defer that question to the director of the CIA. All right. Thank you. I don't think he wanted to answer those questions. I think the answer is we do have the 12 CIA bases there. And I think the answer is there's no way Ukraine can win, Senator. They've lost over 500,000 young men in their military. I think it doesn't matter. And I think you agree, what equipment we send them, they don't have the manpower with which to operate it.

Yeah, you can have all the equipment you want. And if they don't have the manpower with which to operate it. Yeah, you can have all the equipment you want. And if you don't have the people to run that equipment, to work on it, to maintain it, the pilots to fly the planes, the people to take care of the planes, to refuel, you know, we can keep pumping this money over there all we want. But they cannot win. I don't care what they say. There's no possible way a country the size of Ukraine, just with their people, and even though all of NATO has tried to help them

financially, they can't win. Vladimir Putin has actually built his military up, and we have probably would like to go back to day one and make some adjustments because now that Sweden and Finland are in NATO, Finland has 900 miles of border on Russia's, with Russia, 900 miles. And you know, that really makes Vladimir Putin mad. So at the end of the day, they can't win. We know that. I've had, Judge, I have been to classified hearings. I've listened to Blinken. I've listened to Sullivan. I've listened to everybody talk about, you know, this is a must deal because he's going to continue to go on through, speaking of Putin, all the way through Europe.

The guy can't beat Ukraine. Okay. And how in the world is he going to take on anybody else past Ukraine? He can't afford it, number one, but we have financially helped him by raising the price of oil to $70, $80 a barrel. It has made them rich again. It's financed their entire military. And who's the cause of that? His name is Joe Biden when he shut our oil and gas down. I interviewed a Russian businessman who's a former FSB agent and had a second career. And I said to him, we had a translator, what do the people in Moscow think of Joe Biden? And as soon as the question was translated, I saw a big smile ear to ear and I'm wondering, what is he

going to say? He said, we have a phrase in Moscow, you know how we high five each other. And the high five is, thank you, Joe Biden. Because what Joe has done with respect to oil and many other things has produced an economic independence and level of prosperity in Russia that exceeds what they had before the Joe Biden imposed sanctions. Why don't we trade with them instead of fighting with them? They're no threat to us. You're exactly right. Our biggest competitor, I don't call them adversaries, they're competitors. China is the biggest competitor. Obviously, Russia is to a point, but their economy is the size of New York or California. What they have is the most nuclear warheads of anybody in the world, and that makes them very, very dangerous. But if we go back to the first day of this war, every decision Jake Sullivan and Secretary Blinken have made, along, I guess, with Joe Biden, has been wrong. They'll make a decision not to do something, and then they'll change their mind and go back to it.

It has absolutely been amazing to me as somebody that's kind of an outsider looking at this situation going, do you know when to stop? I mean, just stop making decisions. Somebody go and sit down with Vladimir Putin and get this thing over with and quit killing people. That's exactly what's going on. And it's not going to stop until we get President Trump elected because, you know, he'll sit down with him and he'll get it over with. And he said he'll do that.

But nobody will. There's no diplomacy or leadership with this group up in 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue as we speak. It's just reprehensible that Sergei Lavrov, the foreign minister of Russia and Secretary Blinken haven't spoken in nearly two years. They should be talking all the time. So there isn't some accident. So they know what's going on. So they can find some common ground. You made a great point about all the errors in judgment they have made. Those errors in judgment are dangerous because history teaches when all else fails, I'm quoting my friend Gerald Cilenti, when all else fails, they take you to war. Do you fear a Vietnam-like buildup like LBJ did because Joe Biden, just like LBJ, wants to run for re-election as a wartime president? Do you think American

troops are going to be on the ground in Ukraine before November, Senator Tuberville? Well, I hope not. But Joe Biden's back's against the wall with all these crazy decisions he's made along with his cabinet. They put the American people in harm's way. They put our military in harm's way. And, you know, there's no doubt that we've got an excellent military in some areas and Marines and I think pilots and a lot of people behind the scenes. Now we have began to DEI our military, turning it into a woke military. But that being said, we can beat Russia. But we don't want to get into that fight. What worries me is what we've seen the last couple of weeks is Joe Biden agreed to let Zelensky shoot long-range missiles possibly into Russia.

And then all of a sudden, what does Putin do? He says, well, I'm going to send a destroyer or two and a nuke submarine to Cuba. Can you blame him? No, you can't blame him. Could you imagine if Mexico entered into a treaty with China and the Chinese put long-range missiles in Tijuana aimed at Dallas, what would we do? Yeah, it's just the crazy people are running the zoo right now. And it's just there's no rhyme or reason. There's no talk about our country. And I think a lot of this is to take the focus off our domestic problems, which we have a tremendous amount.

Because, again, going back to the foreign relations, we, the United States or Joe Biden's administration, has not made any correct moves whatsoever. And you go to the domestic problems, look at all the things we got going on. We're broke, crime is rampant, education is terrible, military is going to heck in a handbasket. And who would ever have thought, Judge, and you're in my lifetime, that these borders would be open in such a dangerous time that we live in? Colonel McGregor, who appears here weekly and is

a big fan of yours, has warned about people coming over here who are agents of foreign governments waiting for the signal to attack. Oh, and by the way, they're bringing fentanyl with them. Another problem for another time. Here's that clip that I promised you with your travel buddy, Lindsey Graham, just to raise your blood pressure a little bit, even though I'm your big fan. Cut number seven, Chris. Your Republican colleague, Senator Tommy Tuberville, just this past week said on Steve Bannon's show that Vladimir Zelensky is a dictator and unconstitutional. And he said this about Vladimir Putin. He doesn't want Ukraine. He doesn't want Europe. He's got enough land of his own. He just wants to make sure that he does not have United States weapons in Ukraine pointing at

Moscow. Those echo some Russian talking points, Senator. I wonder if those remarks from your fellow senator represent the GOP. No, it represents him and him alone. If you spend 15 minutes studying Putin and what he wants, he wants to recreate the Russian empire. He's not going to stop in Ukraine. We celebrated the 80th anniversary of D-Day. It was a failure. It was the unnecessary war described by Winston Churchill. We had a dozen chances to stop Hitler. It's not about

NATO. It's not about American weapons in Ukraine. It's about a megalomaniac wanting to create the Russian empire by force of arms. If you don't stop him, there goes Taiwan. So we've been slow as hell of helping Ukraine. But Senator Tuberville's analysis really misses what Putin's all about. He's an outlier, I think, in the Republican Party. I like him personally. I'm glad he said that at the end. You're very likable. But I'll let you respond to this.

I mean, Senator Graham just never met a war. He didn't want somebody else to fight. Yeah. You know, it's just unfortunate. And again, I've done my groundwork. I'm on the Armed Services Committee. I've traveled all over the world. I've been to different places and talked to all the generals and combatant commanders and everybody.

But this thinking that Vladimir Putin will continue on through Ukraine. Let me tell you, Ukraine is the only one left that's not NATO. And he knows he steps one foot into NATO. That's exactly what the United States and people like Lindsey Graham want to happen, because then we will have to retaliate. And so there's no way, I think, after reading everything, been all through these hearings and all through this war, that Vladimir Putin doesn't want anything to do with going up against the United States or America, even though I don't think we're near the military we were back in the 1990s. uh we we've still got enough firepower uh ingenuity and enough people that we could uh

do a pretty good job on on uh vladimir putin and the russian military but we don't need that we don't need another one we need to get out of these dang words and start worrying about this 35 trillion debt we're in that's our biggest problem as we speak senator last question i know you have to go um do you think there's a chance you can get the NSA to stop spying on innocent Americans as to whom there's no suspicion or probable cause or search warrants? I'll tell you that this whole place up here, there's no telling what they're looking into you or me or anybody else. This intelligence agency up here is out of control. The DOJ, the FBI, and we talked earlier about the FBI or about the border. Even this FBI director says,

hey, it's coming. We're getting ready to have a huge problem in this country because all these migrants. But we're becoming more of a police state when it comes from federal government. The federal government is out of control as we speak. They do whatever they want to. And we need to give this government back to the people of this country. If we don't, we're not going to make it as the United States of America, the one, the greatest ever that you and I have had the chance to grow up in. Coach, what a pleasure, my dear friend.

I hope we can do it again. If you ever come up to New York or Northern New Jersey, I'd love to be able to shake your hand. Thank you. Thank you, sir. All the best to you, sir. Thank you. Of course.

Coming up at 4.30 this afternoon, Scott Ritter and at 5.15, Matt Ho, Judge Napolitano for judging freedom Thank you.