Read the full transcript of a conversation between Judge Andrew Napolitano and international relations scholarProf. John Mearsheimer on Judging Freedom Podcast titled “Killing Without Purpose” premiered March 27, 2025.
TRANSCRIPT:
Introduction
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Thursday, March 27th, 2025. The esteemed Professor John Mearsheimer joins us now.
Professor Mearsheimer, always a pleasure, of course. I have a lot of questions for you going across the board, but we must start with the hot news of the week. In your view, did the Secretary of Defense post sensitive secret military attack plans on a non-secure site?
PROF. JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Yeah, there’s no question about that. I actually, as someone who served in the Air Force and was in intelligence for a while, was shocked that they would even carry on this discourse on Signal. It’s just hard to imagine. One would think all the protocols tell people at that level, and tell their assistants as well who work with them, that this is verboten, you just don’t do this.
And the fact that they were carrying on this conversation and putting what has to be secret war plans on the site is just hard to believe.
The Erosion of Truth in Public Discourse
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: And then, of course, they’re playing games with words, Professor Mearsheimer. “Oh, it wasn’t classified, it wasn’t classified.”
So some things are secret, you know this better than I, whether they’re classified or not. Military attack plans, giving the time, giving the equipment to be used, are of course secret, whether the Secretary of Defense has signed a formal document characterizing them as classified or not. Don’t you agree?
PROF. JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Yeah, I mean, their claims failed the common sense test. And two of them claimed, this is Director Gabbard and Director Radcliffe, under oath that nothing involving the military was posted on this site.
I’ll tell you, I often think about what’s happened to the concept of truth in our society. People just lie all the time. They deceive all the time. They spin all the time. You don’t know what to believe anymore.
This is a tragic situation. And by the way, where it’s most apparent is when it comes to Israel, right? Because there you’re not even allowed to talk about how Israel does this or does that or how the Israeli issue relates to this issue or that issue. It’s just sort of ruled out of court.
And the end result is people end up speaking in oblique ways about the issue at hand. The level of dishonesty in our society is really just stunning.
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Well, now the government is fostering this. We’ll get to this in a minute. But yesterday in this notorious and horrifying video where six masked police from the Department of Homeland Security stopped this Turkish grad student on the street, wouldn’t answer her questions, wouldn’t say who they were, what they were doing. They just grabbed her arms and handcuffed her and whisked her away.
And then they said that they were with Homeland Security. They never filed any documents. They didn’t return the lawyer’s phone calls. And she ended up in the same place in Louisiana where the young man from Louisiana, a place where she’s never been, same place where the young man from Colombia was.
But we’ll get back to that in a minute. I point that out to underscore your argument about the things that happen to people when they speak freely. She wrote an op-ed in a student newspaper saying that the government of Prime Minister Netanyahu had denied food, water, medicine and electricity to the people in Gaza. A truthful statement.
Questions of Espionage and Accountability
Anyway, back to this thing with Hegseth. If you define espionage the way the federal criminal statutes do, the failure to keep safe secret information entrusted to you, the willful or negligent. It’s the rare federal statute that permits a prosecution on the basis of negligence as opposed to intent. The willful or negligent failure to keep safe secret defense materials entrusted to you.
Did the Secretary of Defense commit espionage?
PROF. JOHN MEARSHEIMER: I would leave that for the lawyers and the judges because, you know, I don’t know the technical details. I mean, it sounds like espionage given what you said. But when it comes to lawyers and judges, I’m never too sure, you know, on what basis.
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Understood. And I don’t want to put you on the spot. And I can certainly answer that question. The answer is yes. But to my dismay, about two hours ago, the attorney general said there will be no criminal investigation. I don’t know if that’s her decision, if that’s FBI Director Patel’s decision, or if that decision came from the White House.
But you’re not surprised by that, are you?
PROF. JOHN MEARSHEIMER: No, I’m not surprised at all. There’s a young man, Jack Teixeira, who’s sitting in a federal prison for 20 years because he shared this kind of information with his own email group. Not with the public, but with his own email group.
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: But was it nearly as relevant, nearly as specific as what Hegseth did? So in Donald Trump’s America, it depends on who you are, not what you did, if you get prosecuted.
PROF. JOHN MEARSHEIMER: It’s not just Donald Trump, though. I mean, the problem is bigger than Trump, right? There’s something fundamentally wrong in this country. It goes back many, many years in many administrations. This is not to defend Trump for one second, and one could argue that what they’re doing with ICE now is a giant leap forward in terms of our dissent. But nevertheless, the problem is very deep here, and I don’t know how we’re going to get out of this mess that we’re in.
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: The problem is very deep. You know, Jefferson predicted in 1826, shortly before he died, that in the long march of history, liberty shrinks and government power grows.
We’re seeing government power today, the likes of which we’ve never imagined.
The Ethics of Targeted Killings
It turns out that the identification of the person that they were talking about killing in this series of texts was made by Mossad. Now, that is not mentioned on the text, but two American intelligence agents unnamed in the article were quoted by the Guardian of London as saying that Mossad provided the information about who to kill and when to kill. This guy’s going to his girlfriend’s apartment, and they blew up the apartment building.
We have had Pepe Escobar, a regular journalist who’s a friend of the show on, and he was on Monday after this killing, and he demonstrated conclusively that the killing was in a residential neighborhood and they killed civilians. Did you notice? I’m sure you did, professor, that in all the transcripts of all these conversations between Hegseth and Rubio and Waltz and the others and the vice president, there was never a debate about whether to kill. It was only about when to kill.
What is gained by the American military by all this killing?
PROF. JOHN MEARSHEIMER: I’m surprised that you find this surprising. I mean, we are and have been supporting a genocide in Gaza since late 2023. I mean, there’s nothing new here.
And furthermore, if you look at our behavior in Afghanistan, our behavior in Iraq, our behavior in Libya, our behavior in Syria, the number of people who have died, and here we’re talking about civilians, you know, women, children, elderly men, is off the charts. I mean, this is just standard fare for the United States of America.
If you look at Israel, just how it behaves in the Middle East these days, it’s shooting the works up in countries all around the region, and we support it. Nobody protests. They decide they’re going to attack in southern Lebanon. They do it. They decide they’re going to attack in Syria. They do it. We decide we’re going to attack the Houthis. We do it.
We don’t care about the Constitution. We don’t care about the law. We don’t care whether civilians are being killed. I mean, this is the point that we’ve reached here. So I find that there’s nothing surprising about this tape.
The Human Cost in Gaza
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Since you were on last Thursday, the Hamas health ministry announced that they had buried their 50,000th Palestinian Gazan resident. The number didn’t make a big deal worldwide at all. We are totally unfazed by the magnitude of the slaughter, and that’s a small number because this doesn’t count the bodies that are found in the rubble.
This counts just the bodies that they were able to find in the streets and the buildings and bury.
PROF. JOHN MEARSHEIMER: It’s also very important to understand that it doesn’t include the people who will die in the immediate future or the near future as a result of what’s happened in Gaza. In other words, if you go back to the Holocaust, the Jews directly, I mean, the Germans, excuse me, the Nazis murdered significant numbers of Jews directly, but large numbers of Jews in places like the Warsaw Ghetto died slowly over time.
So you want to remember that this number is probably, if you take into account those indirect deaths in the range of 200,000.
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Wow.
PROF. JOHN MEARSHEIMER: And the Lancet report made this clear. But again, are we surprised by this? Again, we’ve been supporting the genocide since the fall of 2023. The Israelis are now trying to starve the Gazans to the point where huge numbers die and they’re forced to abandon the Gaza Strip. That’s what the policy is. So this is just not surprising at all.
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Policy paid for by Donald Trump, not personally by him, but with American funds. And before that by Joe Biden.
PROF. JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Correct. This is what’s happened to American values. The United States is supporting an apartheid state that’s engaged in genocide. Do you need to know any more?
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Right. Right. OK, back to Hegseth.
Leadership and Accountability
You’re a graduate of West Point and you spent, correct me, six years in the Air Force?
PROF. JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Five years in the Air Force and I was an enlisted man in the Army before I went to West Point.
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Oh, my goodness. God love you. OK. We can talk about that experience at another time. But you know competent leadership when you see it.
Is this competent leadership or statecraft? This conversation that they had that sounded like high school kids on a non-secure venue and then lying about it afterwards?
PROF. JOHN MEARSHEIMER: No. I mean, as I said to you at the start of the show, it’s hard to believe that they carried on this conversation on Signal. And then furthermore, when you look at the way the conversation was conducted, they kind of do sound like high school kids.
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: The Guardian of London, which really loves to stir the pot, claims that this was not a mistake that Mike Waltz made, but it was rather sabotage by MI6, which loathes Trump and everybody around him and is trying to embarrass them. You have any thoughts about whether this was honest error, a PR stunt? Remember this fellow Jeff Goldberg at The Atlantic was used by Dick Cheney very effectively to write propaganda pieces in favor of the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. Honest error, PR stunt or sabotage? Any thoughts?
PROF. JOHN MEARSHEIMER: I think it’s possible. It’s one of those things that you can’t reach a judgment on until you have the evidence. My gut instinct when I first heard about it is that Mike Waltz is a neoconservative. He’s basically owned by the lobby and he is surely talking to Jeff Goldberg.
Jeff Goldberg is probably the most prominent journalist who is pro-Israel. So it’s hardly surprising that Waltz would be talking to Goldberg. I would imagine that he inadvertently, Waltz did, or somebody on his staff inadvertently included Jeff Goldberg in the discussion.
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: All Waltz would have to do is acknowledge that and the story goes away and the arguments about espionage and incompetence leaves the front page. But all of their obfuscating, take a look at this nonsense. Mike Waltz trying to explain himself to Laura Ingram, who looks like she’s about to grill him.
And then, of course, she becomes one of the team.
LAURA INGRAHAM: So your staffer did not put his contact information? But how did it end up in your phone?
MIKE WALTZ: That’s what we’re trying to figure out.
LAURA INGRAHAM: But that’s a pretty big problem.
MIKE WALTZ: That is what we’ve got the best technical minds, right?
LAURA INGRAHAM: That’s disturbing. I’m sure everybody out there has had a contact where it was said one person and then a different phone number.
MIKE WALTZ: But you’ve never talked to him before, so how’s the number on your phone? I mean, I’m not an expert on any of this, but it’s just curious. How’s the number on your phone?
LAURA INGRAHAM: Well, if you have somebody else’s contact and then somehow it gets sucked in.
MIKE WALTZ: Oh, someone sent you that contact. It gets sucked in. Was there someone else supposed to be on the chat that wasn’t on the chat that you thought was on the chat?
LAURA INGRAHAM: So the person that I thought was on there was never on there. Who was that? What person?
MIKE WALTZ: Look, Laura, I take responsibility. I built the group.
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Okay. I never heard of this sucking analogy that he used from one phone to another. And, of course, it’s absurd to think that the two of them have never spoken to each other.
PROF. JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Yeah.
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Jeff Goldberg is furious. Listen, I’m not a fan of Mr. Goldberg for a variety of reasons, but he is furious. And rightly so. These people are trying to throw him under the bus.
PROF. JOHN MEARSHEIMER: I would just add to the conversation here. There’s this word that seems to have gotten lost in our vocabulary. It’s called accountability. Nobody is accountable for anything anymore.
I mean, you would think that somebody would be held accountable for an egregious mistake like this. You know, the level that Waltz and Hegseth and those folks are operating, you’re in a no excuses world, right? National Security of the United States is at stake. Your job is to protect this country. And you’re not supposed to make mistakes like this. Again, a no excuses world. And when you make a mistake like this, you’re relieved of your post, period.
There’s got to be some accountability. But there’s no accountability in the American system, which is one of the reasons, only one of the reasons that we careen from one disaster to another.
Ukraine Situation
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Right. Right. Moving on to Ukraine, Professor Mearsheimer. The president claims, you know, the Russians don’t reveal how these things are going midstream. At least they haven’t been. But the president claims that there has been progress in the negotiations. I have no reason to dispute that.
But at the same time that he says there are progress, that progress is being made in the negotiations in Saudi Arabia. The Europeans are offering to provide a security backup to replace the United States in Ukraine. This is mind boggling.
The Feasibility of European Intervention in Ukraine
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: It’s not even feasible, is it? It’s mindless. This is not even a serious possibility, right? It’s not even a serious possibility. They simply don’t have the capability.
PROF. JOHN MEARSHEIMER: You know, you talk about the Europeans, the Europeans are a bunch of different states which have different priorities. So Germany, France and Great Britain.
I mean, what remains of the British army wouldn’t even fill Yankee Stadium. I don’t know what Keir Starmer and Emmanuel Macron and Frederick Mertz claim they’re accomplishing. They may actually be damaging the negotiations if Vladimir Putin takes them seriously.
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: What would happen to them if they occupied a portion of Ukraine as some sort of a security guarantee? The Russians would demolish them.
PROF. JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Yeah, the Russians have made that clear. I mean, it’s just not going to happen.
This is the sort of craziness that’s coming out of Europe, mainly out of the western part of Europe and mainly from Britain and France. I wouldn’t throw the Germans into that mix. I’m not sure the Germans would put forces in there.
The Poles have made it clear they won’t put forces in Ukraine. The Italians have made it clear they won’t put forces in. And the British have hardly any forces to put in there.
So I don’t think that whatever the ultimate resolution is, Vladimir Putin is going to stick to his original demands. And that includes no security guarantee for Ukraine, no NATO, no forces there. And anything short of that, he’s not going to agree and they’ll just keep fighting.
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Right. Correct.
Trump Administration’s Approach to Russia
PROF. JOHN MEARSHEIMER: And I think—let me put it this way—it appears that the Trump administration is willing to accept Putin’s main demands. One of which you just described. There are two others, of course. But it looks like Trump is going down that road.
If you look at the ceasefire discussions in Riyadh, we basically played Santa Claus with the Russians. It’s really quite striking. If you look at the terms of this maritime deal, the Trump administration was very generous to the Russians.
Now, the ceasefire or the wheat deal or the Black Sea deal is small change compared to the really key issue of whether or not you can satisfy the Russians with regard to their principal demands on Ukraine. But nevertheless, Trump is going down that road. It’s hard for me to imagine he’s going to turn around now.
And once you go down that road, you basically have to make the concessions that the Russians demand.
Russia’s Territorial Ambitions
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: When will the Russians stop acquiring real estate?
PROF. JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Well, they haven’t even conquered—it’s very important to emphasize this—they have not even conquered all of the territory that comprises the four oblasts that they have annexed. So one would think that maybe by the end of the summer, maybe a bit before then, they will have reconquered or they will have conquered all the territory in those four oblasts.
Then the interesting question becomes what additional territory will they take? Will they take Odessa? Will they try to take Kharkiv?
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: You know, I’m thinking of the conversation that I was uniquely privileged to have with Foreign Minister Lavrov.
And when I said to him, this is before Secretary of State Rubio came out with some sort of an agreement for a 30-day ceasefire that was agreed to with President Zelensky. This is long before the 30-day ceasefire, or I don’t know how long it is for attacking energy infrastructure. This is long before the maritime cessation of violence.
Would you accept any kind of a ceasefire? He looked at me and he went, well, would we? When we are like this, holding his fingers an inch and a half apart, sort of a universal signal of we’re that close, that close to achieving what we want, which is what you have articulated.
How close are they to having physically conquered the four oblasts that they set out to seize, which in their view is really part of Russia?
PROF. JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Well, they’re very close. But let me just explain the relationship between a ceasefire and a meaningful peace agreement.
The Russian view is we have to get a meaningful peace agreement on the table, and everyone has to agree that we’re going to implement it before we have a ceasefire. The Trump administration, on the other hand, and Zelensky want a ceasefire now, a comprehensive ceasefire, and then we’ll work out a deal. Do you see the relationship?
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Of course, of course.
PROF. JOHN MEARSHEIMER: And what the Russians are doing is they’re agreeing to these itsy bitsy ceasefires, like we’re not going to attack energy infrastructure and we’re going to re-institute the wheat deal in the Black Sea. But the Russians are not agreeing to a comprehensive ceasefire.
That’s what Lavrov is talking about, because the Russians have a vested interest in continuing the fight and putting the Ukrainians and the Americans and the Europeans in a worse and worse position so that they get leverage at the bargaining table. So until Trump agrees to the principal demands of the Russians, I believe you’re not going to get a meaningful ceasefire. And who knows how much longer the Ukrainian military can last, no matter what weaponry the Trump administration continues in, I’ll call it the Biden pipeline, not to demean Biden, but he’s created it.
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Yeah, I think that’s exactly right. It’s hard to imagine that Trump is going to go back to Congress and ask for more largesse so that we can keep the Ukrainians fighting. And in fact, I think Trump will tell the Ukrainians for purposes of gaining leverage over them that he can’t go back to Congress.
The votes are not there, so they better wrap this up before they run out of weapons. I think that’s a truthful statement that the votes are not there, even though Republicans control both houses of the Congress. The votes are just not there.
Potential War with Iran
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Is the United States preparing for war against Iran?
PROF. JOHN MEARSHEIMER: I think we’re preparing for the possibility. I don’t think we’ve made a decision to go to war against Iran. And I think if the Trump administration has its druthers, or at least President Trump and the restrainers in his administration have their druthers, we won’t.
But as you know, the Israelis are putting a huge amount of pressure on us to go to war. And he has all sorts of people in his administration, people he foolishly brought in, who are basically neoconservatives and are joined at the hip with Israel. And they’ll put enormous pressure on him as time goes by.
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Everybody in that Signal chat is an open and notorious Zionist, every single person, including Tulsi Gabbard.
PROF. JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Because they have no choice. I mean, this is America.
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Well, let me ask you this. Can Donald say no to Bibi?
PROF. JOHN MEARSHEIMER: He can say no. I mean, he’s not running for reelection, and he can say no. Will he say no? Everything that’s happened since January 20th, when he took office, tells us that he won’t say no, because he’s been doing Israel’s bidding since then.
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: I guess I should ask, can President Trump say no to Mrs. Adelson?
PROF. JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Well, it’s the same thing, because Mrs. Adelson and Prime Minister Netanyahu are basically joined at the hip.
Conclusion
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Wow. Professor Mearsheimer, thank you very much. Thanks for allowing me to go across the board on all these topics.
It’s always a joy to be able to pick your brain. And I hope we can get together for a meal one of these days. We’ll figure it out like we did not too long ago.
PROF. JOHN MEARSHEIMER: I look forward to that, and I look forward to being back next week.
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: As do I. Thank you, Professor. All the best.
PROF. JOHN MEARSHEIMER: And same to you. Thank you.
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Coming up tomorrow, Friday, at 4 o’clock in the afternoon, the Intelligence Community Roundtable with Larry Johnson and Ray McGovern.
And then at 5 o’clock, a special live from midnight in Sanaa, Yemen. Who else? Pepe Escobar. Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom.
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