Read the full transcript of a conversation between Judge Andrew Napolitano and journalist Max Blumenthal on Judging Freedom Podcast titled “Hegseth Reveals US War Plans” premiered March 25, 2025.
TRANSCRIPT:
Introduction and Signal Chat Controversy
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Tuesday, March 25, 2024. Max Blumenthal joins us now. Max, thank you very much.
What I thought would be a conversation about people escaping from Venezuela and then being returned back against their will because the government without evidence says they’re gang members, and what I thought would be a conversation about what is to be gained by bombing the Houthis, now begins with a conversation about Jeffrey Goldberg and the Atlantic and how his name got in a list of senior American national security officials.
I do want to ask you about Venezuela and I do want to ask you about the Houthis. But to get to this very hot topic now and Mr. Goldberg, whom I don’t know and you probably know or know of, being included in a text thread about targeting individuals and the use of various American equipment with which to do it in the Houthis is fascinating and very, very serious. What’s your take on this? How did Goldberg get into that mix?
MAX BLUMENTHAL: Well, by Jeffrey Goldberg’s own admission, he received a Signal message from Mike Waltz, the National Security Council director, two days before he was apparently mistakenly brought into the 19-member “bomb Yemen” Signal chat of Trump national security principals and top Trump advisors.
Why was Mike Waltz reaching out to Jeffrey Goldberg? Let’s look at Jeffrey Goldberg’s history. This is someone who as a young man was a follower of Meir Kahane and made aliyah to Israel, became a prison guard at the Ktzi’ot concentration camp guarding Palestinians during the first intifada, wrote a book about it, sort of reformed himself, but remained a key bigwig within the Zionist world and became one of the Beltway media’s top access journalists partially as a result of that.
Jeffrey Goldberg, during the run up to the Iraq war, was used by Dick Cheney to draw a link between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein in The New Yorker. Dick Cheney cited Jeffrey Goldberg’s reporting twice in Meet the Press appearances. Under Obama, Benjamin Netanyahu used Jeffrey Goldberg to try to push the Obama administration into attacking Iraq. Goldberg was pushing out all these stories that an Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear sites at Natanz was imminent unless the US would step up and do something.
Now there’s momentum again for an attack on Iran. And suddenly the NSC chief reaches out to Jeffrey Goldberg because obviously he was looking to move the neocon message on behalf of the neocon elements in the Trump administration. And it looks like Goldberg was in Mike Waltz’s phone and he brought him into this group. To me, it has to be a mistake, otherwise it’s suicidal. Because Jeffrey Goldberg, while being pro-war, while representing a neoconservative element, is also editor-in-chief of one of the most anti-Trump magazines in the country, the Atlantic. So why would you bring him in to this smoke-filled chat room?
The Mistaken Addition and Goldberg’s Response
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: So Mike Waltz literally brought him in, but he must have thought it was somebody else’s phone number.
MAX BLUMENTHAL: Well, if your name is showing up as a bubble that has your first two initials on Signal, it could have been the US Trade Representative whose initials were J.G. It doesn’t seem like Mike Waltz or whoever’s operating Mike Waltz’s devices is the brightest bulb. And so there it was. I mean, what else could the explanation be?
We’re hearing from Trump cultists that what really happened was Trump was trying to get some kind of secret message out there which resulted in hugely embarrassing hearings today at the Senate. So it really just doesn’t stand to reason that this was intentional. It was an own goal. But they were lucky that Jeffrey Goldberg was the man in there. Because what did Jeffrey Goldberg do once he discovered that this chat was real? It wasn’t some kind of prank. He did the opposite of what I would have done.
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Right.
MAX BLUMENTHAL: What I think any adversarial was absolute.
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Would have been absolutely protected by the Pentagon Papers case. The government is stupid enough to raise the blind and let you look in. You’re a journalist, you’re entitled to publish it. It’s of material interest to the public. Instead, Goldberg shut it down.
MAX BLUMENTHAL: Absolutely. Jeffrey Goldberg went and basically told the manager that he was in a place he wasn’t supposed to be. Why would he do that? He left the chat. Any journalist, I mean, what I would have done was I would have stayed in there, gathered as much information as possible. I would have had a best-selling book, I would have had hundreds of scoops. I would have seen how the sausage is really made.
This is an illegal war. And that’s what the story really should be about, is the policy. But what Jeffrey Goldberg did by leaving, then telling the White House, then blowing this whole thing up, was to make it an OPSEC failure scandal, which is sort of a palace intrigue about a bunch of bumbling idiots from the stupid party who aren’t supposed to be in these posts that should be occupied by really smart guys like Jake Sullivan screwing around with national security.
The real story is a gargantuan empire waging an illegal war without congressional approval on a poor besieged country because it is controlled by the only force on the planet that is actually taking up arms to stop the Gaza genocide, which Jeffrey Goldberg supports. So Jeffrey Goldberg didn’t want it to go there. He steps away, makes it about OPSEC, about bumbling fools.
And that fits with the whole Beltway press culture.
Trump Administration’s Response
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Why are Trump, Hegseth, even Sebastian Gorka, trashing the Atlantic rather than trashing Mike Waltz?
MAX BLUMENTHAL: Great question. Why isn’t Mike Waltz fired?
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Right.
MAX BLUMENTHAL: Trump fired.
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Why isn’t Mike Waltz being prosecuted? That kid Jack Teixeira is in jail for 20 years for revealing far less relevant, far less timely national security data than what Waltz caused to be revealed by Goldberg.
MAX BLUMENTHAL: Well, even from the point of view of Donald Trump, I mean, he just made Trump look bad. Very, very bad. And Trump tends to fire people when they do that or become vengeful towards them. He’s fired hundreds and hundreds of Department of Veterans Affairs longtime employees. But unlike Mike Waltz, they don’t have the backing of Miriam Adelson.
Mike Waltz is there for a reason. He is a longtime Israel lobby plant who rose through the congressional ranks because he is an anti-Iran hardliner. And so his position for now is secure. If I were even Pete Hegseth or any of these other not very cultivated Trump principals, I would still be very wary of dealing with Mike Waltz ever again.
What Gorka and Hegseth are doing by just attacking Jeffrey Goldberg as a leftist fake news media non-journalist, is trying to keep the Trump base secure. Hegseth even brought up “Russia, Russia, Russia,” like the Russiagate hoax. And that’s to make the Trump cultists believe that this is actually some kind of fake scandal that the liberal media is putting on Trump, when in reality it’s about the Trump administration being heavily penetrated and controlled by neoconservative elements like Mike Waltz who are reaching out to Jeffrey Goldberg to sell a policy that contravenes the America First policy that Trump sold his base.
So it’s all just like before. We see a kind of a circular firing line. They’re circling the wagons to protect, number one, Donald Trump, who has sold out his base already within just a few months.
Hegseth’s Comments on the Houthis
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: I’m going to play a clip in just a moment, but before we do, one of the things that Goldberg quotes Hegseth as saying, this is really crazy in light of what has happened, is that Hegseth says “no one knows who the Houthis are. Just say Biden failed and Iran funded them.” Good Lord. If no one knows who the Houthis are, he doesn’t know who he’s trying to kill and why he’s trying to kill them?
MAX BLUMENTHAL: Well, he’s basically saying the American public doesn’t care and has no idea why we should be fighting these people in Yemen because they clearly pose no threat to the American public.
J.D. Vance, who’s sort of on the other side – Hegseth’s on the Trump loyalist, Trump lackey side of the debate. He’ll do whatever he thinks Trump wants. And once the policy’s handed down, Hegseth’s job is just to sell it to the public. He’s just a Fox News hack. Mike Waltz is on Netanyahu’s side. He’s playing the role that, like a Mike Pompeo would have played in this administration.
And then on the other side, you’ve got Joe Kent, who is operating under Tulsi Gabbard as her counterterrorism director, and J.D. Vance, who are sort of the realist, more cautious voices. And you can see both of them speak out against the policy. This is why I thought it would be so valuable if you had an actual journalist in there, unlike Jeffrey Goldberg, who would have stayed there and documented all of the debates as they panned out.
But Vance says there’s no American interest being advanced here. Only 3% of US shipping goes through the Suez Canal. What we’re basically doing is protecting European shipping. He doesn’t say Israeli shipping, because that’s the only thing that the Houthis were planning to attack. And then Joe Kent says, why are we operating on such a tight timeline? We could wait even longer, another month. Because Kent is trying to delay the war.
Both of them are clearly against it, but they ultimately have to fall in line like good soldiers or they won’t have careers. So there’s a debate going on there. And what we can see through these very valuable conversations is an acknowledgment that this war on Yemen serves no national security purpose for the United States and is not protecting Americans.
The Legality of the War and Goldberg’s Background
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: It’s an absolutely unlawful act that they are engaging in. Congress doesn’t even have the ability to declare war against Yemen because Yemen poses no threat whatsoever to the United States. Turns my stomach when this happens. And I did not know about Goldberg’s background. Goldberg was actually a prison guard for the IDF.
MAX BLUMENTHAL: Yeah, he actually laid hands on defenseless Palestinian prisoners by his own.
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Is he an American or is he an Israeli?
MAX BLUMENTHAL: Well, it looks like he’s both. He was born in the US and he was bullied as a boy and got into Meir Kahane’s fascist ideology because he thought, you know, I want to be a tough Jew who can fight for himself. And then he made aliyah. He emigrated to Israel and joined the Israeli army as a young man, became a prison guard. He was assigned to guard Palestinians who were arrested during the first intifada and then went on to write a column for the Jerusalem Post, an Israeli newspaper.
And that’s where he sort of cut his teeth as a journalist. Then he came back to the US and wrote this book, “Prisoners,” about how he actually became friends with one of the men he was guarding. And they learned that, you know, it was wrong and that they should make peace. Of course, peace on Israel’s terms.
And Goldberg emerged subsequently as the leading pro-Israel journalist in Washington, which made him extremely important to every administration. Like, if you want to speak to someone who has the confidence of the Israel lobby, but who’s also kind of a liberal, writes pretty well and writes for The New Yorker, in the Atlantic of the enlightened magazines, then you go to Jeffrey Goldberg. That’s why he is one of the key access journalists in Washington. That’s why Mike Waltz reached out to him.
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: And what you’ve just said would be known to Mike Waltz?
MAX BLUMENTHAL: Absolutely. I’m sure someone in the lobby told Mike Waltz and for Waltz, like getting Goldberg to carry your leaks and being able to use him to move the message is especially important because Goldberg represents someone from the enemy camp, from the other side. But you share something in common with him. You both want to see the U.S. attack Iran.
Hegseth’s Denial
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Chris, here’s Hegseth denying that war plans were discussed in the text, even though according to Goldberg, they talked about time, place and manner and identity of people they wanted to kill. So how he could say war plans were not on there, I don’t know. But here he is.
([REPORTER]: Why were those details shared on Signal? And how did you learn that a journalist was privy to the targets, the types of weapons used?
[PETE HEGSETH]: I’ve heard, I’ve heard I was characterized. Nobody was texting war plans. And that’s all I have to say about that. Thank you, I appreciate it.
[REPORTER]: The NSC said it was authentic.)
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Play the next one, Chris. I think you’ve seen this, but you’ll get a kick out of it. Number 14, can you share how your.
Hegseth Reveals US War Plans
Video clip:
[REPORTER: Information about war plans against the Houthis in Yemen was shared with a journalist and in the Atlantic and were those details classified?
[PETE HEGSETH]: So you’re talking about a deceitful and highly discredited so-called journalist who’s made a profession of peddling hoaxes time and time again to include the Russia, Russia, Russia hoax, or the “fine people on both sides” hoax, or “suckers and losers.” This is the guy that peddles in garbage. This is what he does.
I would love to comment on the Houthi campaign because of the skill and courage of our troops. I’ve monitored it very closely from the beginning. And you see, we’ve been managing four years of deferred maintenance under the Trump administration. Our troops, our sailors were getting shot at as targets our ships couldn’t sail through. And when they did shoot back, it was purely defensively or at shacks in Yemen. President Trump said, no more. We will reestablish deterrence. We will open freedom of navigation, and we will ultimately decimate the Houthis, which is exactly what we’re doing as we speak from the beginning, overwhelmingly.]
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: According to Pepe Escobar, who was there in Yemen, and we interviewed him yesterday. All they’ve done is destroyed residential neighborhoods and kill civilians.
MAX BLUMENTHAL: That’s the Hegseth exchange I was referring to. And he’s right that Goldberg is a should be a discredited journalist, and maybe among MAGA elements, he is because he pushed the “losers” story that Trump called World War I soldiers losers, according to some random source. But many of his stories have been discredited.
But in this case, and Goldberg is traditionally very deceitful, but in this case, it looks like he’s telling the truth. They haven’t poked holes in anything that Goldberg has said. The issue for them is that Goldberg is now claiming that classified information was not just discussed, but exchanged in that Signal chat group. Goldberg was too cowardly to bring it out and too deferential to power to show us what it was. But that’s what he’s claiming, which puts them in a world of trouble and raises other questions.
I mean, it is an OPSEC scandal, but I don’t think that’s the real scandal here. Why didn’t they use the secure line that the NSA has established for national security officials? There’s already a secure line. Why did they use the Signal app, which, as we know, I mean, we know that US Intelligence has a backdoor in the Signal. What were they doing?
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Here’s a frustrated Senator Mark Warner, trying to get to the bottom of whether this is classified or not. Chris, cut number six.
VIDEO CLIP:
(Senator Mark Warner: My communications, to be clear, in a signal message group were entirely permissible and lawful and did not include classified information. We will be clear that determination. Because if it’s not classified, share the text with the committee.
Tulsi Gabbard: There was no classified material that was shared in that. So then if there was no classified material, share it with the committee. You can’t have it both ways. These are important jobs. This is our national security bobbing and weaving and trying to, you know, filibuster your answer. So please answer the question.
Senator Mark Warner: If this was a Director Gabbard, if this was a rank and file intelligence officer who did this kind of careless behavior, what would you do with them?
Tulsi Gabbard: Senator, I’ll reiterate that there was no classified material that was shared in that.
Senator Mark Warner: Ma’am, if there’s no classified in materials, share. And then if there’s no classified materials, then answer that. You can’t even answer the question whether you’re on the chat. This is strangely familiar, and I think my colleagues will remember when you couldn’t answer the question, is Edward Snowden a traitor?]
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: I wish he hadn’t gone there. But his other criticisms of her is sound. How can they say that information about the who, what, when, where, and how of killing people in another country in an undeclared war is not classified?
Tulsi Gabbard’s Contradictions
MAX BLUMENTHAL: Well, it’s Tulsi Gabbard’s job as Director of National Intelligence to put her foot down and say, we shouldn’t be doing this. We should be using the secure line. And who’s on here? She’s supposed to be in charge of the operational security, and now she’s sort of hung out to dry by the sloppiness of Mike Waltz. But she’s also at fault here.
Tulsi Gabbard, on March 13, just a few days ago, tweeted a thread where she threatened leakers and she listed various leaks that have come out of the Trump agencies, specifically the national security agencies where she wanted to see FBI prosecutions and she was vowing that Cash Patel from the FBI would crack down. That took place almost exactly at the same time that Twitter thread that Mike Waltz initiated contact with Jeffrey Goldberg to leak neocon pro-war stories to Goldberg and then soon after led him into this group where allegedly classified information was passed on. And now Tulsi Gabbard is claiming that nothing wrong took place.
Let’s take a look at some of the leaks that she thinks should be prosecuted. One of them was from US Intelligence officials telling the New York Times that this Venezuelan gang, which according to the Trump administration, has supposedly taken over parts of the country and is waging war on America and is invading America and therefore necessitates the invocation of the 1798 Alien Enemies act, placing the United States on a war footing against the government of Venezuela. That this gang actually has no involvement with the government of Venezuela and that it poses very little threat to United States national security and actually has a very small footprint inside the United States.
So obviously, they want to prosecute the leaks that contravene their propaganda, their official messaging, but they’re protecting their own in this case, on a much more serious leak situation.
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: She won’t even admit that she was on the thread. Chris, cut number seven.
Video clip:
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: Director Gabbard, did you participate in the group chat with Secretary of Defense and other Trump senior officials discussing the Yemen war plans?
Tulsi Gabbard: Senator, I don’t want to get into this. Ma’am, did you. Were you on.
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: You’re not going to be willing to address. Are you denying that we Will you answer my question, ma’am. You are not TG on this group chat. I’m not going to get into the specifics. Do you refuse to acknowledge whether you are on this group chat?
Tulsi Gabbard: Senator, I’m not going to get into this. Why are you. Why are you going to get into specifics? Is it because it’s all classified? Because this is currently under review by the National Security? Because it’s all classified. If it’s not classified. Share the text. Now, as the White House previously is it classified or non-classified information on.
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: This chat I can confirm.
MAX BLUMENTHAL: Director Radcliffe, were you on the group chat? Senator, I was on a signal messaging group. So you were the John Ratcliffe on that chat?
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: I was.
MAX BLUMENTHAL: Thank you.
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Thank you. Here. Before you respond, Max, let’s erase your blood pressure even more because you were talking about this earlier. Here she is. Well, you’ll see it. Chris, cut number five.
VIDEO CLIP:
[UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: Tweeted just 11 days ago, and I’m quoting you, any unauthorized release of classified information is a violation of the law and will be treated as such. So if this information is classified, what are you going to do?
Tulsi Gabbard: Senator, two points here. First of all, there’s a difference between inadvertent release versus careless and sloppy malicious leaks of classified information. Second point is there was no classified information that was on the information. Committee should get that information.
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: Director Patel. Security Director Patel, my time’s about out and I’m going to use my 12 seconds at the Chairman game. Director Patel, does the FBI launch any investigation of this?
Kash Patel: Senator, I was just briefed about it late last night. This morning. I don’t have an update. ]
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: I would like to get an answer by the end of the day.
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Well, yeah, I mean, there’s. We don’t know if there’s an FBI investigation, but that’s pretty awkward. Hard to believe that there isn’t. I don’t know how they could justify there not being an FBI. Why? Because Mike Waltz is my friend and I trust him. We campaign together for Donald Trump. Is that the reason it’s not going to be an FBI investigation? I think there’s more here than meets the eye.
MAX BLUMENTHAL: I mean, you also have all of these characters who are in this chat. They all have a record of calling for the prosecution of Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton for her indiscreet behavior with her emails and Joe Biden with mishandling classified material, keeping it in his garage. So, I mean, the hypocrisy is kind of off the charts.
Venezuelan Deportations
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: I want to get back to the Venezuelan gang. They were deported not back to Venezuela, but to one of the worst hell holes on the planet that we know of, a supermax prison in El Salvador.
MAX BLUMENTHAL: How did.
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: And the government, of course, did this in defiance of a court order. And the statute that the government decided, the 1798 statute that you mentioned, provides for a hearing if the potential deportees want to say, we are not aliens from an enemy country. So there was no hearing. How does the government know that they are members of a Venezuelan gang if it doesn’t produce any evidence in court to support that?
MAX BLUMENTHAL: Well, in this case, whatever you think about the immigration issue, the question is, do you trust your government? And if you just blindly trust your government, then you don’t believe in the Constitution because what was done here was unconstitutional and took place in an unjustified state of emergency or a state of legal exception where DHS officials fished in a cursory manner through the social media postings of these Venezuelan men, many or most of whom entered the United States legally through the TPS program. They didn’t just run across the border illegally. They didn’t break into the country.
And they found that some of them had tattoos or some of them were making hand signals to look cool in pictures, which I don’t have any tattoos. I think it’s kind of like too. It’s a little bit cheesy to have tattoos at this point, especially someone like me. But a lot of these guys just had random tattoos. One of them had a tattoo of a Real Madrid logo, his favorite football club in Europe. Another one had a compass tattoo. Another one had a tattoo that said “mom” and that was designated as gang tattoos. That made them members of Tren de Aragua.
Another guy held up his hands like this, like he’s looking cool. You know, every heavy metal fan has done that. That’s so they didn’t even match the tattoos to the Tren de Aragua tattoos. I don’t even think TDA members often have the kind of tattoos you see on MS-13 members who are the veteran OGs that you’ll often see in the Salvadoran jails or black sites that have been established by Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele.
And so it was all a propaganda show for Trump because his base was clamoring for more deportations. They weren’t happening. And they had placed every single Venezuelan male in a kind of legal state of precarity by invoking the Alien Enemies Act. And they had to do something. And then Marco Rubio goes and basically breaks relations with the real government in Caracas in Venezuela by refusing to renew Chevron’s lease to refine oil there. And then they want these deportations.
So instead of sending them back to Caracas, there was just a deportation flight there yesterday. They send them to a supermax prison in El Salvador, a country they’ve never been. I would say most of these men have no affiliation with this Venezuelan gang. And they’re subjected to human rights abuses on camera by the Salvadoran authorities. This kind of prison porn where they have their heads shaved and they’re kind of frog marched in very uncomfortable positions, have their faces shaved, and then they’re thrown into cells with hardcore killers and gang members.
One of them was a gay rights activist from Venezuela. Another one was a professional goaltender from Venezuela. According to ICE, most of these men who were deported were not even accused of any violent crimes in the US. So the whole thing is completely bogus.
But beyond that, the Alien Enemies act that has been invoked by the Trump administration has been done on a completely fraudulent basis, which is that Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan gang has been instrumentalized by the Venezuelan government to wage war on the United States. So it simultaneously put the US at war with Venezuela, which is completely crazy. And it has placed 700,000 Venezuelans in the US in jeopardy by designating them as enemy soldiers. I think it’s kind of like of a part of what the Trump administration is doing with permanent residents who protest for Palestine.
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Right before we leave, Max, and thank you for all your time today. Chris has a full screen he wants to show you because we’d like to put it up at JudgeNap.com. Thank you, my dear friend, no matter what we talk about. Thank you for letting me pick your brain. We’ll talk again soon.
MAX BLUMENTHAL: Well, we just turned it up to 11. See you soon, Judge.
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: All the best, Max. Coming up at 3:00 today, Colonel Karen Kwakowski. And don’t forget, at noon tomorrow, the great Max Blumenthal has called him the world’s finest orator for freedom, George Galloway.
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