Judging Freedom - [ SPECIAL ] Phil Giraldi: The FBI and the Freedom of Speech

Episode Date: February 26, 2025

[ SPECIAL ] Phil Giraldi: The FBI and the Freedom of SpeechSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Thanks for watching! Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Wednesday, February 26th, 2025. Phil Giraldi joins us now. Phil, I want to talk to you, at least in the early part of our conversation, about the freedom of speech. Has the government, under President Donald Trump, indicated it plans to engage in unusual surveillance of the speech of people it perceives as being in favor of a Palestinian state or supportive of Palestinian rights in general? Well, I think the clear answer to that is yes. We have the Attorney General of the United States, for example, setting up a task force, which is, oddly enough, investigating the events surrounding the hamas uprising in october uh and uh it's going to be looking at american citizens who are speaking uh well of

the palestinians and of their cause and to be looking at them as anti-semites to an extent where they are subject to criminal response. And they will be cooperating in this task force with Israeli intelligence and police officials who will be in the United States helping to investigate Americans. So you put that together with all the other comments that have been made by the president and by the new director of the FBI and the deputy director of the FBI. And it's definitely a drive to criminalize criticism of Israel on one hand, and on the other hand, to create a bunch of disincentives, for example, at universities, kicking students out of the universities if

they support demonstrations on behalf of the Palestinians, for example, firing staff, cutting federal budgeting that's going towards universities that are deemed to be supporting or allowing this kind of activity to go on. It's all across the board. Are you familiar with what happened to our friend and colleague, Max Blumenthal, at Dulles Airport two days ago when he and his wife and baby were returning from a week's vacation in Nicaragua. Now, what happened was in the United States of America, in Virginia, where Dulles Airport is. Yeah, he was hauled off to an interrogation room on the side and was questioned extensively about his trip and what he was doing. And his wife, I think, was questioned too, as I recall. And this is just another example of intimidation of people who are going against what the government likes to see as acceptable behavior. And that, of course, began with Joe Biden.

You could argue it actually began much earlier than that with people like George Bush and Obama. And it's just getting worse now. We're reaching the stage where they're using weapons like criminalization and delegitimization of the activities that used to be covered by the First Amendment, free speech and free association under the U.S. Constitution. And when are people going to begin to wake up to this? And we're not there as he was at the airport to be harassed. We're there to be free to move as law-abiding American citizens and to speak our minds when we think something is wrong. Max also recounts that he was questioned about statements he made on this very show. Now, that is the core, the essence of the freedom of speech. The whole purpose of the First Amendment is to keep the

government out of the business of the content of speech, and yet they were asking him about the content of his speech on this show, and they mentioned the show by name. So if they're watching now, I would think, don't you guys have anything better to do than to watch this show? You're supposed to be protecting the borders. You are a veteran of the United States military and a veteran of the Central Intelligence Agency. Have you ever been stopped at an airport when returning from a foreign land or stopped after you had returned? I've been more often stopped after I've returned. And I haven't been stopped lately, but we'll go back maybe 10 years or so ago. Maybe you're losing your punch, Phil.

I don't know. Well, I'm not traveling as much. Tell us what happened. Yeah, well, the fact is I would be going to conferences in places like Iran, like Russia, elsewhere in Europe and the Middle East. And in some of these cases, I would be a speaker, or I would be part of a group of Americans who are being hosted over there to participate in the conference. And I would have, the following week, two very nicely dressed, personable, young FBI officers banging on my door without any prior notice or anything was clever enough not to incriminate anybody else I was traveling with. But this was a routine procedure.

And I've also had more than my share of threatening letters from the Office of General Counsel of the CIA about me revealing secrets. That's another good trick. Wow. Wow. Well, I'm going to segue for a minute because the president has just made a rather startling announcement about U.S. troops on the ground in Ukraine. It's about a minute long. Chris, you can run this, please. They spent $350 billion and Europe spent $100 billion. Now, does anybody really think that's fair?

But then we find out a little while ago, not so long ago, a few months ago, I found out that the money they spent, they get back. But the money we spent, we don't get back. I said, well, we're going to get it back and we'll be able to make a deal. And again, President Zelensky be able to make a deal. And again, President Zelensky is coming to sign the deal. And it's a great thing. It's a great deal for Ukraine, too, because they get us over there and we're going to be working over there. We'll be on the land. And, you know, in that way, it's this sort of automatic security because nobody's going to be messing around with our people when we're there. And so we'll be there in that way. But Europe will be watching it very closely. I know that UK has said and France has said that they want to put, they volunteered to put

so-called peacekeepers on the site. And I think that's a good thing. Well, all right. It's unclear if these are actual troops he's going to put on the ground or contractors, if he thinks that Vladimir Putin would accept peacekeepers in Ukraine, he is, in my view, and you correct me if you disagree, grossly misleading, misreading Putin's intention and the Kremlin's statements. In fact, before you even reply, Phil, Foreign Minister Lavrov earlier today, Chris, cut number 11. We cannot consider any options of deploying peacekeepers to Ukraine. I don't know what Macron said there. He did not play his role very convincingly in Washington, but when this topic was raised at a

press conference, as I read, President Trump said a decision to deploy peacekeeping forces is possible only with the consent of both parties, apparently meaning us and Ukraine. No one asks us about this. The concept of peacekeepers is utterly rejected by them and wasn't even raised by Secretary of State Rubio and Riad. I toss it to you, Phil, on all of this. Well, I would have to say that that statement by Trump was possibly the stupidest thing that I've heard in quite some time. You start putting contractors on the ground there in Ukraine, and they are automatic hostages. They're hostages to whoever wants to pull

a false flag, which certainly could be Zelensky. And they basically are not what you want to put into the middle of the situation. And secondly, it shows that Trump really doesn't understand the equities that are at stake in the view of the Russians. He kind of thinks this is something that's transactional. We cut a little here, we do a little there, and we all come out smiling at the end. Well, it ain't going to work that way, Donald. And the fact is, this is very critical national security issues for Russia. And you're just playing at getting some rare earth minerals, which may or not be enough to reimburse you for your expenses. And then it puts you deeper into the conflict, which is the exact reverse of what you should be trying to do.

We just interviewed Professor Glenn Deason, who informs that the vast majority of these minerals that Trump seeks are in the Russian-speaking parts of Ukraine, over which President Zelensky, even if he were the legitimate head of state, would have no jurisdiction whatsoever. Well, that kind of figures, doesn't it? Trump is not even capable of getting briefed on what he's talking about. This is incredible. I mean, I wonder if we're back to where we were when you and Larry Johnson and Ray McGovern and Ritter and to an extent McGregor advised that the intelligence community was telling Joe Biden what they thought he wanted to hear. Are they now telling Donald Trump what they think he wants to hear, even if it's not truthful, even if he's going to make a decision based on it. Yeah, except that I would qualify that comment by saying it's not necessarily

the intelligence community that's telling the president this. It's that circle, that inner circle of Israel firsters and hardliners that he's pulled together. I mean, the more I read the comments that are coming from the Attorney General, particularly on the whole Israel issue, and now the comments we're getting from the director of the FBI and the deputy director and from all over the place. Elon Musk is now identifying Arab American groups as terrorist linked. If you're an Arab American or a Muslim, you're a terrorist linkage. I mean, this is just incredible. Why don't they shut up? Yeah. It almost seems like it's going to be worse under these people who promised the depoliticization of the DOJ and the FBI than it was under the rather clumsy Biden people. Here is a little bit off the wall, but you want this question, but you and I talked about this. Is Benjamin Netanyahu's son exiled to Miami because he actually assaulted his father in Israel? Is this true? Well, this story has been kind of floating around for some time.

What has been known was that the son, whose name is Yair, is living in Miami in a luxury apartment. And the cover story is that he's there to go to school to further his education. And what has surfaced now in the last week is that a parliamentarian in Israel, in the Knesset, who was from one of the opposition parties to Netanyahu, has raised the issue of what is this costing and who is paying for it? The kid apparently has a security pro security detail uh to protect him that comes from is israelis uh israel's uh uh domestic security and uh they're over there and of course they're living in the in the

apartment or whatever it is and uh i would bet there's also a lot of U.S. interaction in terms of the Florida government being knowledgeable of this and the apartment is costing something like $700,000 a year. We're getting the mother, the wife of Mr. Netanyahu, Sarah, she's making frequent trips over there to see her son. So this is all crazy and incredible what conceivable benefit is there to the government of the united states of america for a year netanyahu to be living in miami that's a good question i don't even have a hypothetical answer there is no benefit whatsoever because this could develop into an international situation. I gather from my personal sources back in the intelligent world that this kid is kind of crazy.

And indeed, the anecdote that he was, shall we say, evicted or deported to the United States took place after he either punched or slapped his father. Nobody's quite sure which it was. Is the father determined, in your view, to wreck the ceasefire agreement for which Trump has taken credit, and probably with some justification with Gaza. Yeah, I think we will see probably a termination of this before the second phase is supposed to begin. And Netanyahu has basically been open about this. He has implied, in fact, more than implied, that he has a free hand to resume military, so-called military operations. That's, I guess, what it's a euphemism for genocide. And he has a free hand to do that if he deems that the situation warrants it. And, of course, as he is the one running the security, he can make up anything

he wants. In fact, he's been doing that over the past week. So yeah, I fully expect that he's going to torpedo this and he's going to move ahead with one plan or another, basically to remove the Palestinians from what was once Palestine. Here's Steve Witkoff, the president's personal emissary to the Middle East, partly the Middle East and elsewhere. Mr. Witkoff was also present in Riyadh with Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State, and Mike Waltz, the National Security Advisor. But he's speaking, this is is Sunday on one of the talk shows about how he expects phase two to begin. Oh, and by the way, Hamas, you ready for this?

Must leave Gaza, and he expects it to happen. But before you comment, here he is. Cut number six. The May 27th protocol agreement signed last May 27th sets forth that the phase two negotiation is much about two things. A, a permanent ceasefire, a cessation of all violence. And in addition to that, the fact that Hamas cannot be allowed to come back into the government. And I think the way you square that circle is that Hamas has to go. They've got to leave. And we're going to, the negotiation will be around that. I would say physically, that's correct. Where would they go? Has any country offered to take them in?

Well, I think the devil is in the details, and we've had a lot of discussions around it. I'm not at liberty to have that specific discussion today, but we've got some ideas. John, Mearsheimer would say this is not realism if he thinks that Hamas is going to go because he and Trump asked them to go. And how do you define a Hamas? There are a lot of people in the Gaza Strip that support Hamas, specifically because Hamas is fighting against the country that has been oppressing and killing and robbing the Palestinians

for the past 75 years. Wow. Is Israel, is the Netanyahu regime using force to expel Palestinians from the West Bank with the United States either saying okay or looking the other way? Yeah, he's doing both, or both is occurring. He announced, I think, yesterday that there were 40,000 Palestinians who had fled their homes in Jenin, I think, that would not be allowed to return to their homes. Now, Jenin, of course, is a Palestinian refugee camp, or that's originally how it was set up. And so they're basically, the Israelis who are occupying the West Bank illegally are telling these people they cannot go back to their homes. And they're doing

the same thing, of course, in South Lebanon and Syria. So this is a pattern. And of course, the U.S. has not objected insofar as I know to any of this they've looked the other way and all they can talk about is how much they love Israel and uh if I hear one more blurb from one of our senior officials about how much they love Israel and how they're uh what did one of them say yesterday uh they were going to always uh it was um uh our new uh secretary uh um i'm sorry i'm uh marco rubio no it wasn't rubio it was um sebastian gorka no no no no no no no no no anyway i mean whoever it was they said they were going to prioritize Israel, and Israel was going to be their number one target for providing assistance to, and so on and so forth. Why don't they keep their mouths shut?

Apparently, the president is speaking as we are, and after his cabinet meeting he had some lunch and then he went to the oval office where he's taking a q a and apparently he's talking about continuing to supply the ukrainians uh with i don't know if this is his phrase or the phrase of the questioner, war fight equipment. But we have the clip. Chris, would you run it, please? We don't have it. Okay.

I'm sorry. I thought we did. I thought we did have it. All right. So all I have is this little note. Question, for how long will you supply war fight equipment? The answer, could go on for a while. Maybe until we have a deal with Russia, we need to have a deal first. Man of peace not closing the Biden spigot, which he said he could do in 24 hours when he was the candidate of peace last November.

Your thoughts? Yeah, I mean, this stuff is frightening. This is ignorance piled on top of denial, piled on top of a concept that the president can do whatever he wants and can do no wrong because he's the president. And we're getting into this just deeper and deeper. As I say, when I'm quoting people from yesterday, it was Kash Patel that I was thinking of. And he was saying that Israel is our number one ally. And that was also said by the attorney general. And that was basically also said by the number two guy at the FBI.

So this is a this is a pervasive view that Israel is America's greatest friend and greatest ally. And it's just total fiction. Well, how did they come up with this stuff? Do they have a script writer who writer who dreams these impossible concepts up? It's just absolutely incredible. And the United States gets nothing out of this. USAID, is that a front for the CIA? No, not exactly. I think USAID has a more political footprint than the CIA ever had.

That you have the Congress, the Congress people involved with USAID and and the people who are the staffs of the White House and that kind of thing, much more pervasive than than what the agency was doing. The agency was trying to sneak around a little bit. And most of these things that USAID does now were things that the agency would have done in its heyday back in the 50s and 60s. Wow. Bill Giraldi, a pleasure, my dear man,

no matter what we're talking about. Thank you for recounting some of your personal experiences with the government, more concerned with their power than with the Constitution to the allegiance of which they swore. Always a pleasure, my dear man. We look forward to seeing you next week. Okay, thank you. See you then. Sure. Coming up at three o'clock, my dear friend and a person I admire greatly, and I suspect a lot of you do as well, Congressman Thomas Massey at four o'clock midnight in Moscow, the one and only Pepe Escobar at 4.30, Colonel Douglas McGregor,

Judge Napolitano for judging freedom. I'm out.