Judging Freedom - THIS! - Scott Ritter : --> Is Putin’s Patience Paying Off?

Episode Date: September 4, 2024

THIS! - Scott Ritter : --> Is Putin’s Patience Paying Off?See 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 Wednesday, September 4th, 2024. Scott Ritter joins us now. Always a pleasure, my dear friend, to be able to pick your brain. I want to spend a fair amount of time with you on Ukraine and on President Putin's patience and if there is any pressure on him and the significance of events in Ukraine in the past three or four days.

But before we get there, there was tumult in Israel over the weekend. There are 250,000 people demonstrating outside Prime Minister Netanyahu's house. There was a general strike of everybody that was in a labor union for the majority of the day on Monday until an Israeli court ordered the unions to order their people back to work. The IDF, Shin Bet, are openly feuding with Prime Minister Netanyahu. Shin Bet says that the state of affairs in the West Bank can only be characterized as Jewish terror. Is Israel on the verge of collapse? You know, prior to October 7th, the Hamas attack on Israel, Israel was already in a state of

domestic turmoil, such that the Israeli president said that if left unresolved, and this dealt with Benjamin Netanyahu's efforts to take control of the Israeli judiciary, making changes in the basic law of Israel. Let me just stop you. I forgot to mention it. Also on Sunday, he announced an effort to continue that, as if he doesn't have enough on his plate, to continue that process. Well, I'll tell you why he has to in a second, but I'll tell you now. If he doesn't do that, he's going to have to resign soon. His government will collapse. And when it collapses, he will be charged with corruption and maybe even new charges. And so he needs to

have made changes in the judiciary such that he has a level of immunity when he steps aside. This is what it's all been about from day one. So this is the final action in a sequence of desperate acts by Netanyahu to stay in power. But it's caught up with him. But the Israeli president said that Israel is on the cusp of civil war, not civil conflict, not civil unrest, civil war, where one side's shooting at the other, a total breakdown. Israel's in that same position today. These are fundamental issues right now that deal with the existential survival of Israel that are being debated from within. It all comes down to the hubris of one man, the narcissistic nature of Netanyahu to hold on to power, to retain a

legacy of somehow he's the best prime minister Israel's ever had. He turns out he's one of the worst in the history of Israel. He's done more harm to Israel than any other prime minister. And he's about to destroy Israel if he's not careful. When you have the Shin Bet say that what you're doing in the West Bank is Israeli terror, that means you're doing something wrong. And it's not just that. The IDF is saying, don't do this because we can't sustain this. We're already overstretched. In order to do what they're doing in the West Bank, they have to pull forces out of the northern front where Hezbollah is waiting. The forces they just sent up there to confront Hezbollah, but now they're pulling them back. Meanwhile, he's doubling down on stupid in Hamas, further extending the IDF, an IDF that's already overextended on the breaking

point, logistically, morally, physically, emotionally. The nation is exhausted. Israel can't do this. There's been many observers who have echoed what i've been saying that the longer this goes on the more likely you're going to see the total collapse of israel as a nation state where people will start fleeing in numbers such that demographically israel cannot sustain itself that's where we're at right now in Israel today. And one of the main reasons is because Netanyahu has allowed Israeli civilians, citizens, to die in Hamas custody. And he is under the belief that, you know, whether or not they were executed by Hamas, I don't think too many people believe that story, but I can't make a final judgment on that because I don't know the forensics.

But what we do know is they would have been alive had netanyahu agreed to the ceasefire back when it was put on the table so were others um that the only reason why these people died is that netanyahu is being unreasonable about a ceasefire because netanyahu wants to stay in power and he knows that the ceasefire will bring the end of his coalition and he will have to resign. So for his own political ambition, Israeli hostages have died, and the Israeli people are fed up with this. That's the reality of what's going on in Israel today. Do you think Netanyahu knew of October 7th before it happened, or looked the other way, created the environment in which it could occur? I believe this is a situation that parallels what we saw back in 1973

in the lead up to the Yom Kippur War, where the intelligence services of Israel and the IDF itself were warning of an imminent invasion by Egypt. They had collected all the information. And the dogs are... How are you, Maverick? I think there's somebody at the door, but hopefully they'll get the hint and go away.

I'll tell you, let me deal with this. Give me two seconds. All right. While he deals with Maverick, we are going to talk about Israel, obviously, but we're going to get into with some depth what's been happening in Ukraine. As many of you know today, Prime Minister or President Zelensky fired or requested and received, however you want to look at it, the resignation of nearly all of his cabinet, including his foreign minister. This on the heels of a massive Russian attack using ballistic missiles that travel, as Colonel McGregor said not too long ago, 4,500 feet per minute, which cannot

reasonably be stopped. I think Scott is back. Chris, do we have him back? There we go. Just want to show the culprit, the new puppy. It wasn't the FBI, which is the good news. I thought that it was when you said somebody's at the door. I hope they'll go away. No, just so everybody knows, I guess at two o'clock today, the Justice Department is going to be unsealing a series of indictments that appear to focus on RT and such. So whether or not I'll be part of these indictments, I don't know. So there's always that looming threat of the knock at the door. But that wasn't them, so we shall continue. Yes.

So you were explaining how precarious Netanyahu's situation is and how everything he seems to be doing is generated by his own fear of incarceration and arrogance. And then I asked you if you thought he knew about October 7th before it happened or knowingly looked the other way or created an environment in which it could happen because he wants these wars and he wants an excuse to induce the U.S., let's face it, Lindsey Graham, to attack Iran. Until I get more information, I'm going to give Netanyahu a pass on the more extreme range of potentials. What I believe happened is that Netanyahu was locked in. In September, he was at the General Assembly in New York, briefing them on Israel's role in a newly transformed Middle East, the centerpiece of which was this India-Middle East economic corridor that Joe Biden had briefed during the G20 meeting in India. And Israel plays an important part of this. So Netanyahu was bragging about how Israel

is now going to be working with Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, India, link Jordan, linking up going into Greece and Europe and the role that Israel was going to play. This was his strategic ambition, and he wasn't going to let anything knock him off. He believed that he had bought off Hamas, that he had opened up the borders and allowed thousands of Palestinians to come out of Gaza and get work permits in Israel, and that the economic incentives that were accrued from this were such that all the intelligence that he was receiving about Hamas preparations, he said, that's just Hamas doing political things to keep their people satisfied, but Hamas will never do anything to disrupt this wonderful situation we've created for them,

which, by the way, if it manifests itself, means there will never be a Palestinian state. Now we know why Hamas carried out October 7th. They had to reverse this, and they've been very successful in doing this. I think Netanyahu, together with his senior leadership, allowed themselves to be misled by their own focus on this ambitious program. And instead of doing what they should have done, it's to sit back and take a long, hard look at what this was doing. At a minimum, they had a chance on the night of October 6th to sound an alert, to say, let's call out the reserves. Let's get everybody up. Let's get everybody standing too on the border with Gaza. Let's get everybody ready because we

have information that says they're going to attack soon. But instead, when they met, Netanyahu wasn't even brought into this meeting. The intelligence chief, they said, we'll reconvene in the morning. But by the time morning came, it was too late. So I think this is incompetence. I think this is arrogance. But as much as I dislike Netanyahu, you have to understand there's a visceral hatred of me that goes back to the role he played in the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in 1996. I don't like this guy. I disrespect this guy. I despise this guy. But I'm not going to sit there and say that he deliberately allowed this to happen for some grand plan. Even in Netanyahu's sick mind, I can't see him going there yet. Who knows what the future will show in terms of information. But you do know that his ardent goal and a task towards which he seems to labor

every day is to get the United States in a war with Iran. Correct. But an important part of that is to have Saudi Arabia on your side and understand that at that time, Saudi Arabia just consummated a Chinese-brokered rapprochement with Iran. And so now it's problematic. The only way that you're going to get saudi arabia on your side is to continue this policy that which which in order to implement the united states was putting pressure on saudi arabia saudi arabia had to normalize relations with israel and israel believed that it was on the cusp of normalization of these relations and once that happens and you have saudi arabia in the israeli camp now things things can happen, such as Israeli aircraft can overfly Saudi territory, get refueled over Saudi territory to strike Iran. It opens up a whole bunch of operational possibilities for Israel. So I think that was the thinking there. It's not that he had done away with striking Iran.

That thinking is fruitless now, is it not? Because Saudi Arabia has basically said, forget about it without a two-state solution. Not just that, but Saudi Arabia is now increasingly being dragged into the orbit of BRICS. It is a BRICS member in October in Kazan. Putin is going to be convening the BRICS summit. This is going to be a game-changing summit in every way, shape, and form. BRICS is going to grow into adulthood. It's going to have institutions that are going to be able to coordinate a consensus-driven policy amongst the members. We're talking about expansion, Turkey, Malaysia, Venezuela, Azerbaijan, and other nations are talking about joining this. It's going to create a momentum that's going to drag other nations into

this. And I think Saudi Arabia is looking at the writing on the wall saying this U.S. brokered stuff is history. It's this Russia and China and India brokered stuff that we're going to be jumping in on. That's the future. All right. Well, while we're mentioning BRICS and before we get to the latest in Ukraine, were you surprised that Turkey announced over the weekend that it has made an application to join BRICS? And if that application is granted, and indications are that it will, can Turkey stay in BRICS and NATO at the same time? Well, the answer is legally, yes, Turkey can. But practically, you know, the European Union is the political economic arm of NATO. NATO is the military arm of the European Union. The two live in this, you know, this relationship that supports one another. To have Turkey,

the second largest army in NATO, the key to holding the southern flank of NATO, now divorce itself from the economic aspects of Europe and join the adversary, join Russia, China, to focus on Eurasia. First of all, it's natural for Turkey to do this. Turkey has more in common with Central Asia and Eurasia than it does with Europe. Europe's been rejecting Turkey from day one. The European Union does not want Turkey to join, will not let Turkey join. And so it's only natural that Turkey, a growing economy, a growing regional player with geopolitical clout will turn to the institutions that best support its ambitions, and that's BRICS. I think Turkey's not going to make the

divorce immediate. Turkey has decades of being intertwined with the West. And there's a significant segment of Turkish society and the Turkish economy that is still entangled with the West, tied up with the West. You can't divorce that without creating huge problems for Turkey, both politically and economically. I think what Turkey is going to do by going to BRICS is it's going to compel the West to make a divorce with Turkey. Just like Putin couldn't cut off relations with the West, it took the West sanctioning Russia for Putin to be able to do that divorce. I think Erdogan's a savvy political player, and he's going to make the divorce be initiated by the West. That's an easier thing to explain to the Turkish people. And prior to that divorce coming,

he will have already made his bed in Eurasia by joining BRICS. Yesterday, two intercontinental ballistic missiles, you'd have a better and more accurate description of them than that, struck a military school in Ukraine. More than 50 people were killed. Some of them were Polish and Swedish instructors. A lot of them were students of the school. Over 200 people were injured. What is the military and geopolitical significance of an attack of that magnitude and that nature at this time? Well, first of all, understand that Russia has known about this school for some time. In the West, they've portrayed it as some sort of ROTC school, that these are just college kids going through simple basic military. No, this was a school, a military school being used to train drone operators in advanced drone techniques

and communication specialists that would enable Ukraine to receive and incorporate these Swedish airborne warning and control aircraft. Sweden has promised two of them to Ukraine. These aircraft, if effectively integrated with the F-16s, could enhance the combat capabilities of the F-16s. So you had Swedish instructors, they're training the next generation of Ukrainian war fighters on how to use this weapon that's getting ready to be deployed to Ukraine. And you have Polish instructors and other instructors, some believe even American, training the drone operators on how to use drones

in a combat environment. Drones are a very important part of modern warfare today, especially in Ukraine. These drone operators are a fire support system. They're a reconnaissance system. They're an electronic warfare system. They're a logistics system. You need the training on how to communicate, how to avoid jamming the whole business. It takes a long time to train effective operators. Russia killed them, eliminated them.

They're done. And this is a big class. This isn't like a small class. This is like wiping out an entire West Point class. They're gone. They're not coming back. You can't replace them. This has ripped a giant hole in Ukraine's planned capabilities. They were planning on bringing in these Swedish AWACS aircraft.

They can't right now because they have nobody knows how to use them. They're all dead or wounded. They were planning on doubling down on their drone support to the front lines, collapsing front lines, by the way. They can't now because all the people that are supposed to do that are dead. These are replacements for the drone units that are being decimated by the Russians on the front lines. Ukrainians are very effective at using drones, but when you use the drones, the Russians are very effective at counter drone. They detect you, they hit you, they kill

you. You need replacements, they're gone. This is devastating for the Ukrainians. What is the status of the invasion into Kursk, about which President Zelensky continues to boast as recently as earlier today, saying we now control, and that we captured, for Ukrainians they captured, which we would not have been able to do had we not made this incursion. First part of the question. Second part of the question, President Putin's patience on Kursk. Your thoughts about it? Well, first of all, of course they captured prisoners. A large part of the prisoners they captured were conscripts, poorly trained forces that were sent to a border, which of these soldiers weren't prepared for this.

They got cut off, ran out of ammunition, no hope of being rescued. So they surrendered. And Ukraine captured them. Russia wanted them back, especially the conscripts. They weren't supposed to be in frontline combat. So Russia was more than ready to trade prisoners to get these back. That's normal. I mean, in order to achieve that, though, Zelensky had to commit his strategic reserves, his best units, the best equipped, best trained units with the best

Western equipment, the Leopard tanks, the Chieftain tanks, or Challenger tanks, I'm sorry, the Abrams, the Martyr, the Bradley, the Swedish fighting vehicles, they were committed and they're being destroyed. The soldiers that went with them who were trained in Great Britain and Germany and France, they're dying. So the strategic reserves are gone. He may be holding onto territory right now, but trust me, when this is all said and done, there won't be Ukrainian left in Kursk. They'll all be dead, wounded, captured, or driven out. And the equipment they took in with them

will be destroyed or captured by the Russians. This is not a strategic victory by Zelensky. It was a gambit that failed. He didn't achieve any of the objectives he wanted unless one of his strategic objectives was to capture 1500 Russian soldiers and trade them then wow okay congratulations now you're done with that and you've lost 20 000 strategic reserves to the patience of Putin um I mean let's be honest Kursk is an embarrassment to the Russians. I mean, they are making lemonade out of lemons, you know, and they're going to enjoy the drink

when it's done. But this is something that should never have happened. It's a huge mistake on the part of the Russian Ministry of Defense not to be able to predict this, not to prepare for this. And it's politically embarrassing for Putin, a man who has said, I'm here to protect Russia. And now you have a chunk of the Russian Federation, mother Russia, being occupied by an enemy. It's not a good look. It's not ideal. Putin didn't overreact. A couple of things. One, he didn't divert any of the major forces that are carrying out an ongoing offensive operation in the Donbass, didn't stop that offensive and divert the forces to Kursk. That's one of the goals and objectives that the Ukrainians were hoping for. Didn't

happen. He did deploy a reserve airborne brigade, a reserve marine brigade, and the Ahmad special forces who have contained the Ukrainian advance and are now in the process of just gradually killing every Ukrainian they find. But it's going to take time because they aren't sending overwhelming forces in that direction. Putin made a decision just to contain this problem and then slowly resolve it because the main effort is in the Donbass where today the Ukrainians, the Russians captured the original 2014 defensive fortifications. Ukraine has lost all of its fortifications now. Now they're going to have to be, they're going to have to precipitously withdraw behind the

river if they survive this retreat. This is the collapse of the Ukrainian army taking place, and Putin showed patience to allow this to happen. Putin also, again, we talked about Turkey and BRICS. You know, the strategic goal of the United States and the West is to achieve the strategic defeat of Russia using Ukraine as a proxy. The strategic goal of Russia is even larger. It was announced in a 5,000-word statement that was released by Putin and

Xi Jinping on February 4th, 2022, before the invasion of Ukraine, that said that they are going to defeat the rules-based international order of the United States and replace it with a law-based international order. Today, we can call the law-based international order BRICS. And Russia is in the process of finalizing the creation of the infrastructure for a BRICS establishment that will be able to work similar fashion to the G7 with ministerials on a regular basis, consensus-driven decision-making, joint policy decisions. But to do that, they have to attract people there and they have to get everybody to agree. The one thing that might disrupt this is if Russia is seen as overreacting to Ukraine, expanding the conflict precipitously, disrupting regional security and global security to the extent that nations may choose not to come. This is one of the things I believe is the strategic intent of the united states in backing the uh the ukrainians in kursk and in encouraging to use

uh destabilizing weaponry long-range strike weaponry because they're trying to get russia to overreact to kill uh bricks putin's not going to let that happen when he started speaking back in the the the st petersburg international economic forum which you and i should have been at um you know he didn't start off by talking about the ukrainian conflict even though everybody in the west was focused on that he spoke about bricks he spoke about the economy he spoke about uh multilateral relationships that's his strategic focus and he's never lost focus on that so his patience is linked to a policy direction, which emphasizes the economic and the political over the military. Here is a typically direct and succinct President Putin on all of this, the essence of which is that Ukraine has failed late last week, cut number four.

Their calculation was to stop our offensive actions in key parts of the Donbass. The result is known. Yes, of course, our people are going through a tough time, especially in the Kursk region. But the main task of the enemy was to stop our offensive in Donbass, and they failed. Failed. I was wrong when I said last week. That was actually on Labor Day. That was actually Monday, two days ago, when he said that. Let me go back a step. What were the missiles that struck the military school outside of Kiev? Well, I don't know. I mean, I think the feeling is that they were

air-launched cruise missiles launched from TU-95 Bear bombers. They could have been an extended range version of the Iskander missile. I don't know until I see the if I ever get to see the debris and no one's going to show it to me. I think the feeling is that they were what they call X-101

air-to-ground cruise missiles fired from Russian strategic bombers. Are these missiles that cannot be shot down? Well, they're very difficult to be shot down. They're not hypersonic missiles, but they're missiles that have been modernized. The Russians have been upgrading all of their weapon systems since the beginning of this conflict to take into account Ukraine's growing military capabilities brought on by you know the West providing them with you know modern surface to air Intercept capabilities so the Russians have been upgrading their systems to to be able to defeat this plus keep in mind that Russia leads

off all of these attacks with drone attacks and in supporting attacks that are designed to suppress Ukrainian air defense to clear a path for the weapons to hit their primary target. What is the current state of America's nuclear strategy? Well, this is where it gets very scary, Judge, because according to the New York Times, in March of this year, the Biden administration signed off on what's called a nuclear employment guidance, presidential nuclear employment guidance. It's a document that very few Americans hear about because it's very rarely talked about because it's a very sensitive document. We've all heard about the Nuclear Posture Review that was published with much fanfare back in 2022. And to the surprise of people who watched Biden campaign in the lead up to the 2020 election, where he promised to change the nuclear posture to a sole purpose doctrine, meaning the sole purpose

of America's nuclear force would be to deter nuclear attack against the United States or respond with overwhelming power against anybody who dared attack. Biden didn't do that. Instead, he sustained a nuclear posture that was put in place by the Trump administration, which talks about preemptive nuclear strike, incorporating new families of nuclear weapons, W76-2 low-yield nuclear warheads loaded on cruise missiles and Trident missiles on Ohio class submarines. And these two new weapons caused the Trump administration to issue presidential nuclear employment guidance on how to absorb these weapons and how to incorporate them into the war plan. Now, normally, if the posture stays the same, there's no reason to change employment

guidance. So something happened to cause's no reason to change employment guidance. So something happened to cause the Biden administration to change employment guidance. And according to the New York Times and others, that appears to be China. China has not responded well to America's threats about Taiwan and the South China Sea. When you have American generals saying that we're going to go to war with China. China says, well, we're going to defeat you, which means you're probably going to use nuclear weapons. And if that's where we're going, you might want to preemptively nuke us since your doctrine says you're going to preemptively nuke us. I want to remind everybody during the Trump administration, there was a senior arms control official speaking at a public forum who said it's the goal of the Trump administration to have

Chinese and Russian officials wake up every morning, not knowing if this was the day America was going to nuke them. Dead serious. So now what China did is they built 360 silos in the Western deserts of China, and they're going to deploy about 100 DF-41 missiles. These are solid rocket missiles, instantly launched, 10 warheads each, and they're building the warheads to do that. They've gone from 200 warheads when Biden first came in to around 500 warheads now, with a projection of about 1,000 to 1,500 warheads by 2030. So Biden's nuclear planners are looking at this and saying, hey, we don't have the capacity to deal with this.

Right now we're limited by the New START Treaty, which gives us 1,550 warheads. We only use about 1,400 some of them. The Russians are limited the same way. But now with this expanding Chinese threat, we got to change our nuclear employment strategy to divert warheads that are allocated to Russia, now allocated to the Chinese target. This means now you have to change the war plan on how we plan on fighting Russia, because you have fewer warheads, which means that we're probably going to have to lean forward even more aggressively and put more emphasis on preemption in case we detect the Russians to do something, because you have to maximize

the lethality of the reduced number of warheads. The same thing with China, preemption. Preemption is the death of us all, because preemption means that we're ready to launch preemptively if we detect something that we deem to be a threat. I think people should watch, there's a movie out called Reagan, a new brand new Dennis Quaid's in it, and some people won't like it. And you know, it's, it's, it's a fluffy movie, but there's an interesting scene in there. And it's based on reality where literally Reagan is sitting at the, at the situation room and they open up the briefcase and he's looking at the cards to call out the codes to launch the weapons. He's being told you have to launch now,

the missiles are incoming. You have to launch now. The missiles are incoming. You have to launch now, Mr. President. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is saying, National Security Advisor, Secretary of State, launch now or we all die. And he held off until the phone call came in and said, oh, it was a flock of geese. The radar misidentified. Okay. That's the world we live in now. We are leaning forward, looking for any opportunity to launch because that's what the military does. They're told, here's your nuclear employment plan. If the following conditions are met, prepare to launch. And so there will be in the not too distant future, a scenario that manifests itself, that meets the criterion. And somebody's going to be calling the president saying, launch now, Mr. President. Why had, how can I ask you why Biden has done anything? If I asked him

why he did it, he might not know. Why has he done this? Why do you think he's done this? Given that Joe Biden, before he was president, was so harshly critical of the concept of first strike. Because no president has the courage to take on the nuclear establishment. To do this, Joe Biden would have to stand toe to toe with the four-star general or admiral who commands strategic command and directly contradict him. Look him in the eyes and say, I don't agree with you and I'm the commander in chief. You will execute my orders. But Mr. No buts. One more but and you're fired. But you're fired. And now Congress will rise up and they'll start saying, well, who are you, Joe Biden, to take on this brave general who's commanded nuclear forces?

And then you'll have other people come in, the policy people who will say, no, the president's wrong on this. When China is a strategic threat, you'll bring in all the Chinese experts. China's ready to nuke us. And it's a political nightmare. You know who stood up to this? JFK in Cuba. You know, Curtis LeMay, the hero of World War II, cigar smoking general. You got to nuke them now, Mr. President. You got to nuke them now. And Kennedy stared him down and said, no, you stand down. I'm the commander in chief. It'll happen when I want it to happen. And only then. We don't have presidents of that caliber anymore. We have weak politicians who sold out the

establishment a long time ago. And unfortunately, as I said, I went to a reunion, the reunion of the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaties and Negotiators two years ago. And we were there when a senior Biden administration arms control official who asked to remain anonymous gave a presentation. Afterwards, these veteran arms controllers, the people who invented arms control, invented verification, invented disarmament, the INF Treaty, one of our senior members who we all respect deeply, former chief of staff of the on-site inspection agency, asked the question, Biden promised to have sole purpose doctrine. And now he's come out and he's put out a nuclear posture review that continues to have preemption and all that. How did that happen? Is he not the commander in chief? And the response we got was that the establishment, no, I'm sorry, the national, oh, the interagency, that is,

the interagency wasn't ready for it. And we're all looking at it going, the interagency, I didn't vote for them. The interagency is, you know, the Defense Department, State Department, Department of Energy, et cetera, all these stakeholders in the nuclear enterprise who come together under the auspices of the National Security Council and advise the president on strategy. Advise the president. They don't make policy. They implement policy that the president dictates to them. Apparently, the interagency told the president to pound sand. You're not going to get sole purpose. We have this Chinese threat. The president didn't have the cojones to stand up to the admiral. because to do so, you'd have to put your political future at risk, your legacy, and no president has the courage to do that. Fascinating stuff, Scott. Thank you very much, my dear friend. Fascinating and brilliant analysis,

as always. We'll see you again next week. All right. Thank you. Of course. All the best. My head is almost spinning at all of that data and all of that information and all of that analysis. Aaron Maté coming up at 345 Eastern this afternoon. Please remember to go to Judd's Nap, juddsnap.com. You'll find everything I've written there. You'll also find how you can reach us if anybody decides that what we say is a little too hot for their venues. Like and subscribe, and you'll help others find us as well. Judge Napolitano for judging freedom. MUSIC