Editor’s Notes: In this episode of Judging Freedom, Judge Andrew Napolitano is joined by former CIA officer Phil Giraldi to analyze the growing tensions surrounding the U.S. conflict with Iran and reports of internal fractures within the Trump administration. Giraldi offers a blistering critique of the president’s mental state and decision-making process, particularly regarding the rejection of U.S. intelligence in favor of foreign interests. The discussion also explores the alarming reality of the president’s sole authority over the nuclear football and the potential for a catastrophic escalation in the Middle East. (April 22, 2026)
TRANSCRIPT:
CIA Officers Killed in Mexico: Standard Operating Procedure?
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Today is Wednesday, April 22nd, 2026. Phil Giraldi joins us now. Phil, a pleasure. Thank you. Before we dig into your piece, Donald Trump Pulls the Trigger, I did want to ask you about this bizarre event outside of Mexico City in which an automobile crash resulted in the deaths of two U.S. Embassy employees, and then it turned out they weren’t embassy employees, they were CIA officers. Is this surprising, or is this the standard operating procedure?
PHIL GIRALDI: Well, actually, it’s standard operating procedure in that CIA employees generally, when they are overseas, either have one of two covers. The cover they most often have is embassy cover. That is because there are more in these places, there are more employees of the embassy, and there are more places where CIA officers can be inserted and covered. The other one is, of course, military. In some countries, of course, there’s a large U.S. military presence, and CIA officers will have military cover. That’s usually not as a military officer, but as a Department of Army civilian. So that’s the two big covers overseas.
So I was surprised to see it. I’d like to know more about what their business was, what they were up to. And it might be an interesting story, but as of right now, it’s not very clear.
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Well, they’re both male, right? And they’re both married. So if their spouses try and bring an action against the government or against anybody, they’re not going to get anywhere because you know that they’ll make a state secret claim. They could have been going to lunch, but the CIA is not going to reveal what they were doing, right?
PHIL GIRALDI: That’s probably the likelihood. What they’ll do is they’ll use the easy way out, which is to say we can’t expose their cover. That would be a secret. So that’s how they avoid having to actually discuss what they were doing, and it’s an easy way out for the government.
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: One of the chatters writes in that they died in the Chihuahua province, which is adjacent to United States. So who knows if they actually came down from the U.S. or up from Mexico City.
PHIL GIRALDI: That we will probably learn. We will probably learn where they were posted, if indeed they were undercover in, say, Mexico City or some other Latin American country. But Chihuahua, of course, would lead to suspicion about it being drug-related, which the agency does get into increasingly, shall we say.
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Hmm. Am I making a big deal out of this? Is this something worth pursuing? Other people died as well. Mexican nationals died who were officials of the government.
PHIL GIRALDI: Right. Well, hopefully we’ll pick up something from one side or the other. The Mexican government clearly has some level of knowledge of what was going on, although if they were CIA, they weren’t exactly briefing the local government on what they were doing, although that happens on occasion. But we will find out more, I suspect, over the next week or two.
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: If they were engaged in some sort of a drug transaction undercover, not stealing drugs themselves, would this have been done with the knowledge of the Mexican government or without the knowledge of the Mexican government?
PHIL GIRALDI: It could go either way depending on what the level of the operation was and what basic briefing went from one direction to the other or from both directions prior to this thing taking place. So I would leave all the possibilities open. I know certainly when I was overseas running operations against terrorist groups and that kind of thing, we very often worked with the local intelligence services, and that’s not exactly atypical.
Is the President of the United States Insane?
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Got it. All right. Is the President of the United States insane?
PHIL GIRALDI: Absolutely, and he’s also a psychopath.
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: All right, what causes you to make those two statements?
PHIL GIRALDI: Well, what comes out of his mouth, his constant message to the rest of the world is that we will punish you if you don’t do everything absolutely that we insist upon, and what we insist upon is usually insane, as we are seeing currently in the Iraq-Iran situation, and we saw previously in Venezuela, and we have been seeing on the high seas as they kill people whose crimes they have not actually ascertained, but it is convenient to call them druggies.
This is a government that is totally out of control, and it is totally out of control because the guy who is at the top is insane, a psychopath. He basically is crazy enough where even his own staff do not want to challenge him ever and basically are there to tell him what a genius he is and what great stuff he’s doing, which is all a lie, and they know it’s a lie.
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Is he capable of critical thinking?
PHIL GIRALDI: Does not appear to be. I cannot see any evidence of his having done it in terms of the actions that actually come out of what the foreign policy of the United States has been and national security policy. I cannot see any evidence of it.
Trump Rejects U.S. Intelligence Consensus on Iran
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: We interviewed Joe Kent earlier today.
Very charming, articulate, intellectually honest, personally courageous young man, as you and I both know. And he was unaware of an instance in which the President of the United States rejected intel from American agencies, a broad consensus. I’m not talking about an oddball representation, but a broad consensus. Iran has not been working on a nuclear weapon since 2003, does not have the ability to do so, and accepted the contrary from a foreign intelligence service. Have you ever heard of that?
PHIL GIRALDI: Well, I think the story is pretty well attested that that’s exactly what happened, that this was in the lead-up, of course, to the latest war against Iran, the one we’re in right now with what is passing for something called the ceasefire. This was in the discussion to that where there were a number of people that were in on the discussion, including the vice president, who were, shall we say, lukewarm about the idea of going to war with Iran because Iran had not threatened the United States.
Now, that meant that Mr. Benjamin Netanyahu, the head of state of Israel, had to intervene in this process. And apparently spoke on the phone to some of the players, or at least certainly to the president, and convinced him that Iran was again on the verge of a nuclear weapon, which is the charge that’s been used for decades now. In fact, I think Netanyahu, the most— 20 years ago, he made that charge, and there might have been even accusations similar before that. So we’ve been looking at this 20-year development of a nuclear weapon by Iran, which our intelligence services and foreign policy services all agree is not true.
And this was enough to convince Donald Trump. So I would say his critical faculties are either non-existent or basically all geared in a way to listen to what the Israelis and what the Israel lobby in the United States is telling them, and that’s of course to tell us to go to war with anyone that Israel considers to be an adversary.
Tulsi Gabbard, Ratcliffe, and the Mossad Connection
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: So Joe Kent did tell us one thing that I thought was newsworthy, and that was that Tulsi Gabbard did advise against the war and reaffirmed the statement she had made now a year ago, under oath to the Congress, that Iran has not been— this is the consensus statement, it’s a consensus of all the agencies from whom she gathers data, that Iran was not, hasn’t been engaged in developing a nuclear weapon since 2003. Joe said 2004. I think we’re talking about the same thing.
He then said— this is what I think was news, at least to me— that John Ratcliffe, who some of our friends on the show refer to as a Mossad stenographer, meaning he takes down and says whatever they want him to say, agreed with the Mossad. I thought Ratcliffe had disagreed with Mossad since one of the 18 agencies that gave the consensus about which Tulsi Gabbard spoke is his— your former employer, the Central Intelligence Agency. So what am I missing here, Phil?
PHIL GIRALDI: You’re not missing anything. What you recognized was that this revelation was indeed very interesting. This means that the consensus of CIA analysts was then, and I presume it is now, that Iran was not developing a nuclear weapon in any way, shape, or form. And that is what went through the office of Tulsi Gabbard, because that is the office that is in charge of all 18 intelligence agencies and solicited their viewpoint on this issue. So it was unanimous, including the CIA analysts.
And here we have the CIA director, whom you correctly describe as a tool of Israel, giving a contrary opinion to Donald Trump, who was just sitting there looking for, hoping that somebody would agree with his good friend Benjamin Netanyahu, and he gave him that opinion. This guy should be taken out and tied up somewhere and left there. But this is the characteristic and the character of the entire Trump higher office with all these people who are totally unqualified for what they do and are there just to be yes-men.
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Well, he certainly should be fired. I mean, what would the basis for the statements he gave President Trump be when the professionals that work for him gave him 180 degrees the opposite and gave it to Ms. Gabbard, who articulated it under oath, where if she lies, she could be prosecuted?
PHIL GIRALDI: Yeah, well, that’s the point really. I mean, here you have a guy, if his brain is working in any capacity, he should know what his analysts are saying, and he should have had at least a much better cover story of some kind to give the president, or with the gathered people there, the impression that he actually, as I say, had some functional thinking going on, which clearly he doesn’t. But that’s what we live with now with the Donald Trump regime.
Does Netanyahu Control Trump?
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: When I asked Mr. Kent, who’s very candid— this is a war of aggression, this is Israel’s war, the Israelis talked the president into it, the Israelis always exaggerate, particularly exaggerate their own strengths— he was very, very candid. I don’t think any of that was new. He had said it many times. What I hadn’t heard before was what you and I were just discussing about Director Ratcliffe disagreeing with his own agents.
But when I asked him if Netanyahu controls Trump or Trump controls Netanyahu, he gave a rather equivocal answer but an interesting one. He said, “Well, we’ll find out pretty soon. Trump’s going to have to get out of this war, and Bibi doesn’t want him to. Then we’ll find out who controls who.” Do you agree, or are you of the view that Bibi and his Zionist buddies in the U.S. have the president wrapped around their finger?
PHIL GIRALDI: I watched the program, so I did listen to him saying that, and I was a little bit taken aback. I think the clear evidence is that at least over the last year and 4 months, Mr. Trump has conceded every single point, every single argument made by Bibi Netanyahu, and has done what Netanyahu and Israel and the Israel lobby wanted. It’s not just Netanyahu. Remember the lobby here. The lobby here is maybe even a bigger force and power in what comes out of Trump’s mouth and the kind of decisions he makes.
So this was a unified effort, or it has been a unified effort, and I believe that Trump will do what Israel wants, which is to continue the war, and I fully expect that we’re going to be seeing that in the next couple of weeks, if not before. Trump is not his own man, if he ever was, and this is something that Israel wants very much, and this is why I even argue that this could go nuclear because Israel wants it so much that it will twist the arguments in such a fashion as Donald Trump will be somehow convinced that Iran is a threat to the United States.
I mean, a couple of his recent rants have included even the one against the Pope and against the Prime Minister of Italy. The fact that, oh well, Iran will have a nuclear weapon. And what did he say about Italy? That then in 2 minutes, Italy would be destroyed. He said about the Pope tolerating Iran’s nuclear weapons. I mean, this is in Trump’s head and it’s been put there by the usual suspects.
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: He said that Robert Cardinal Prevost, the Pope’s real name, would not have been elected Pope had Trump not been the President of the United States. I mean, where does this come from?
PHIL GIRALDI: Total fantasy.
Can Trump Order a Nuclear Strike on His Own?
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: I don’t want to upset the viewers, but I have to ask you this because you wrote about it. With all of his mental deficiencies as you see them, can Trump on his own order the nuclear devastation of Tehran or Moscow or Beijing?
The Nuclear Football and Presidential Authority
PHIL GIRALDI: Yeah, well, this is the danger. See what I began to think— I’ve often, over the last couple of months, as this situation with Iran has accelerated, I’ve often thought, now what if Trump decides to go nuclear? And it then occurred to me, I said, now what is there existing in this nuclear football that is carried around by a military aide wherever the president and vice president— where the president is, and possibly the vice president if the president’s not available— which is the thing that they use to launch a nuclear or other counterattack.
And that’s— it’s interesting to wonder to what extent that is something that one man can make a decision all based on his judgment and his opinions and start a nuclear war. And I was wondering if that is the way the system works. And I looked at it and looked at whether there were checks and balances in the system to prevent that from happening, having to go through a couple of stops before you actually pull the trigger, and it turns out, of course, there aren’t. This is quite plausibly something that any president can do based on just opinion or judgment, or as Donald Trump puts it, his feelings.
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: You know, our dear friend Larry Johnson reported that Trump asked General Cain about the nuclear codes, and Cain said either no or we’re not going there and walked away. Now, Larry has a source that was there or inside the White House at the time. Obviously, I believe Larry, but this must mean that this very issue, as horrific as it is, is on Trump’s mind.
Chris is posting from us.gov or congress.gov that the President of the United States has sole authority to authorize the use of nuclear weapons. This authority is inherent in his— I’m reading— in his constitutional role as Commander-in-Chief.
PHIL GIRALDI: Right, absolutely.
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: There’s some word out there that it requires 3 other people, but I don’t think so. I think the guy with the so-called nuclear football probably has to talk Trump through a number of steps. You wrote about this.
PHIL GIRALDI: Yeah, but the whole process takes 25 minutes, right? Which tells you there isn’t any kind of safety valve on it. It’s desirable that the threat, whatever they’re reacting to, be something that’s demonstrable and imminent. And that’s what the whole thing is about. But if Donald Trump were to assert that he believes that Iran has a nuclear weapon and it’s about to be launched, that’s about all he needs to do. And he’s getting that kind of output from Israel.
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: I suppose the only check would be if General Cain ordered that guy with the nuclear football to leave the White House.
PHIL GIRALDI: Well, except that General Cain might not even know about it. The chain of command is from Trump down to the box.
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: What rank is that fellow with the football, do you know?
PHIL GIRALDI: No, I don’t know actually. He’s probably a senior enlisted man, but I’m not sure, and I’m not sure which branch of the service he’s in, or if he’s even someone who has a particular expertise in nuclear weapons and what they might do. He might just be an enlisted man who’s under orders to carry this box around.
Trump’s Options on Iran
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Aye, aye, aye. What do you think Trump will do? He postponed the end of the ceasefire without giving a date. They called back Vance before he left for the airport. According to Professor Marandi, who we also interviewed today, the Iranians consider Vance, Witkoff, and Kushner to be Netanyahu’s puppets.
PHIL GIRALDI: Right.
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: So I don’t know, where is this going to go?
PHIL GIRALDI: It’s either got to go— I was on Russian RT today and we were talking about this very subject and I said it’s got to go one of two ways. Either the one way is since Netanyahu and company will not let Donald Trump get out of this without continuing warfare against Iran to destroy Iran, Trump just has to pull the plug and say, you know, screw you, Bibi, that’s it, game is over. But he’s not going to do that, I don’t think. And I think that leaves him with one option, which is basically to continue the war in one form or another and under various cover stories and lies to pretend that the United States is threatened. And I suspect that’s the way he’s going to go.
CIA Leaks and the Search for an Off-Ramp
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: So the Washington Post is reporting— stated differently, the CIA is leaking— “Trump eyes Iran deal with many of the trade-offs he blasted Obama for accepting, including billions in frozen assets.” Billions that may be handed back to Iran— that’s how desperate he is for an off-ramp. You know, if this comes to the Washington Post, that means that your former colleagues want it out there. Is that probably the case here?
PHIL GIRALDI: Yeah, I rather suspect that people who are of sound mind in the administration, of which there might be one or two— and they might even be over at CIA— who are basically looking for a way out that actually solves some problems. That is a horrible thing to be asking for from the Trump administration, but there might be some people that are actually moving in that direction, and God bless them. God bless them all.
Closing Remarks
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Chris, have we hit that 750 number yet? When we started the show, we were at 749,105 subscriptions. I wasn’t sure if we would break 750,000 on your watch, Phil. That will apparently happen tomorrow or Friday. But thank you for all the contributions you’ve made. Thank you for your time. I love our time together and look forward to the next one already.
PHIL GIRALDI: And you know, we didn’t even get to this— to me, which was the biggest story of this week— where Donald Trump wants to award himself the Congressional Medal of Honor.
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Oh, I didn’t even see that one. I guess that means he believes he can pardon himself also if he can give himself awards. All right, I believe his lawyers are negotiating with the IRS over his $10 billion claim against them. Gee, that’s going to be fair. Yeah, yeah. Oh well, one of these days there’ll be justice in the world. Thank you, Phil.
PHIL GIRALDI: Okay, hope to see you next week.
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Yes, all the best, my dear friend.
PHIL GIRALDI: Bye-bye.
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Bye-bye. So we are in that 749,000 range and one of you will be the 750,000th subscriber probably tomorrow. Tomorrow, Thursday, a lighter day than usual but an important one. At 2 in the afternoon, Aaron Maté. At 3 in the afternoon, he’s been waiting all week and emailing me just about every day, Colonel Douglas Macgregor. Justin Paul Tenner for Judging Freedom.
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