Judge Napolitano: Midterms Fallout & the Great Unraveling of Trump and America First (Transcript)

He is so hung up on this personal strength thing. I believe he will try to do as much as he can by executive action.

Now, at some point, not yet, because they did pass a budget that began on October 1st of this year. It ends on September 30th of ’27. At some point, he’ll have to go to the Democrats for money. And one thing Congress could do, which it does very well, is to do nothing. Nothing. If they don’t pass a budget, he can’t spend any money.

Or if they put a poison pill in the middle of defense authorization, which he cannot veto. I mean, he could legally veto it, but it would be catastrophic if he stopped funding the Defense Department. And the poison pill said all troops and military equipment will be out of the Middle East within 60 days of this law coming into effect. He probably would violate the law, but he’d be under tremendous pressure to comply with it.

Look, he doesn’t care about the law. He signed into law the Lindsey Graham Act 2 weeks after Senator Graham died, which prohibited aid to Russia and made the sanctions permanent. A week later, he had an agreement, a handshake, a metaphorical handshake, ’cause they weren’t in the same room, with President Putin which called for the Russian sale of diesel. Russian big oil selling money to America, selling diesel to American big oil, which doesn’t need it. At the same time that the American CIA is showing Ukrainians how to bomb Russian refineries. You can’t make this up, but that’s the situation that he created.

But my point is, he didn’t bat an eyelash of doubt about violating the law, this Lindsey Graham Act. Yet spending money not authorized is such a direct violation, not only of the law, but of the Constitution. He might very well find himself in hot water with the federal courts.

A Political Off-Ramp in the Middle East?

GLENN DIESEN (00:09:06 – 00:09:28): I was thinking that this could offer Trump an off-ramp though in the Middle East. That is, if he’s looking for a way to save face, he can essentially argue, as he keeps arguing, that he already won the Iran war. If they cut off the funding, then it’s the Democrats who robbed America of a victory, essentially.

JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO (00:09:28 – 00:11:46): Very good point, Glenn. The Democrats, if they don’t fund the war, may actually give him an out. A political out. The Iranians, of course, will be rejoicing. He can claim that he won the war all he wants. The rest of the world will know this is just political chicanery, but it will be an out.

I’m hoping, as I think you are and most people watching us, that he would just honor the document he signed, the Memorandum of Understanding, which the Iranians have said time and time again, they will honor. And once he begins honoring it, the Strait of Hormuz is open within 48 hours.

I don’t know where this is going to go. Latest stunt that Benjamin Netanyahu was pulling, it’s on the front page of this morning’s New York Times, is that Iran has chemical weapons. Now, the American CIA has told Trump Iran doesn’t. And most people react the way you did when I told you this is Netanyahu’s claim. Nobody takes it seriously except Netanyahu and Mossad, who pretty much have Trump wrapped around their finger. How far this will go, I don’t know.

As you know, on Election Day, he said, without telling the Israelis he was going to say it, the United States will begin phasing down aid to Israel. Well, no one here takes that seriously. I don’t know how it will affect Netanyahu’s ability to craft a new government. I hope he fails, even though Gadi Eisenkot won’t be much better. At least we’ll be rid of the monster with the track record of what he’s been doing for the past 30 years.

But it shows you his desperation. When he’s desperate, he has strings he can pull on President Trump, and that’s a danger, Glenn. Trump will never have to face the electorate again, and his party will never have to face the electorate again during his presidency. He’s almost liberated to do whatever he wants, which means whatever Netanyahu wants.

U.S. Foreign Policy: Iran or Russia?

GLENN DIESEN (00:11:46 – 00:12:18): I was going to say both Netanyahu and Trump are in a bit of a desperate situation at the moment, which isn’t what you want the leaders of Israel and America to be in. But how do you see overall the US foreign policy being shifted on this? Or, well, more specifically, its wars?

Because obviously it looks as if the Democrats would like to scale back or end the war against Iran, but when it comes to the war against Russia, they look like they would like to scale it up. And,

JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO (00:12:18 – 00:12:19): Correct.

GLENN DIESEN (00:12:19 – 00:12:20): And more weapons.

JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO (00:12:20 – 00:12:21): Correct.

GLENN DIESEN (00:12:21 – 00:12:24): How do you expect any big changes?

JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO (00:12:25 – 00:13:58): Well, I expect an effort to craft a compromise whereby the United States would stop aid to Israel and bring troops out of the Middle East, but begin resuming aid directly to Zelensky. That will be the compromise. Trump will have to hold his nose and do that. I say hold his nose because, as you know, you and I have discussed this, he called for Zelensky’s departure from office.

I don’t think the Kremlin believes anything Trump says. I make that conclusion from my own on-air and in-person private interviews with Foreign Minister Lavrov. I think the Kremlin believes that nothing can change materially in the relationship between the United States and Russia until Trump is out of office and we have normal diplomacy with normal diplomats rather than— and this is Foreign Minister Lavrov’s word, you’ve heard me use it— rather than sending us “2 grifters,” which is how he referred to Witkoff and Zelensky (sic).

So that might bring about a change. Resume the Russophobia, the craziness of funding Ukraine, but get the heck out of the Middle East.

GLENN DIESEN (00:14:01 – 00:14:11): So, yeah, it’s not really an option between war or peace, I’m thinking. That is, it’s a little bit like in the past when, which war do we focus on, Afghanistan or Iraq? Now we have, yeah, Russia or Iran.

JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO (00:14:12 – 00:14:54): Right. I mean, Trump has crazy ideas about war. The other day he said, “I could have won the Afghan war in a week.” Well, what is he talking about? He was the president of the United States during the last 4 years of that war.

Then he said he could have won the Vietnam war in a week. For which Vietnam veterans howl in laughter. He has no idea what he’s talking about. Then he said we should have bombed Ho Chi Minh City. Well, Ho Chi Minh City is Saigon, which was on our side in the Vietnam War. So his knowledge of what you would expect a president to know was woefully, woefully deficient.

Why America First Failed

GLENN DIESEN (00:14:55 – 00:15:39): Yeah, that’s a bit frightening actually. But I was curious, how did he end up in this situation? Because he had the greatest comeback story in American history, of being able to come back in this magnificent way. And then he— and it was all on this platform of America First. He was going to end all these forever wars in the Middle East. He was going to end the war with Russia.

And, yeah, as you said, he didn’t actually end the war with Russia. He didn’t end the forever wars in the Middle East. Instead, he leans into the fantasy of having been in the position to end the Vietnam War, even though he doesn’t have a lot of the basic knowledge about this. But why? Why do you think America First failed?

JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO (00:15:42 – 00:18:13): I think that there are 2 reasons that they both may be relevant or either one. One of the reasons is there is very damning evidence of his behavior, personal behavior from many years ago in the Epstein files, and Epstein himself, obviously before he died, shared that with his friends in the Mossad, and that is hanging over his head. I don’t know if that’s true. Obviously, I haven’t seen this stuff.

The other is that he is beholden to the Israeli lobby in the United States, Mrs. Adelson, Dr. Adelson, she’s a doctor, the wife of the late Sheldon Adelson, funded many, many Republican campaigns, not the least of which was his. Now, he spent a billion. She only gave $100 million, but still, that was the largest donation that went to his campaign.

The third is, I said there were two. The third is that he has surrounded himself with Russophobes and neocons. With the exception of the vice president, to a person. And these are the people that listen to him. His chief of staff is the former campaign manager for Benjamin Netanyahu. So whoever whispers into his ear, with the exception of Vice President Vance, is whispering all this pro-Zionist propaganda. And he has succumbed to it.

So those are the 3 reasons that people bandy about here in the United States. I don’t know if the Epstein stuff will ever become known. And AIPAC says it’s not supporting political candidates anymore. That doesn’t make any sense. They poured a ton of money into his campaign and he’s clearly beholden to them.

His son-in-law is Jewish. His grandchildren are Jewish. He’s terrified of being called an anti-Semite, which of course is what they call you when you oppose the regime of Benjamin Netanyahu. It has nothing to do with your feeling about the Jewish people. It has, but that’s their technique. And he just is terrified that that paint will be brushed on him.

Who Really Runs American Foreign Policy?

GLENN DIESEN (00:18:17 – 00:18:47): Besides the Epstein files, the Israeli lobby— I mean, it’s not just a lobby directly, that Netanyahu— how much influence do you think though that the Pentagon, the intelligence agencies, defense contractors, or powerful interest groups, how much do they have? Because we see in the election now, we see a huge shift of power, but where is America’s strategic direction actually decided?

JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO (00:18:47 – 00:21:16): When you’re on my show, I think tomorrow, I’m going to ask you who runs American foreign policy, the president or the intelligence community. Now you’re asking me.

The intelligence community is out of control, Glenn, and it has been for many, many years. The president of the United States, a reprehensible person in my view, who created the intelligence agency, reprehensible because he dropped 2 nuclear bombs on Japan, Harry Truman, before he died, denounced the agency that he created when he learned that they were not just spying, but they were engaged in covert action.

And you and I mentioned earlier in this interview the fact that while the US is buying oil from Russia, the CIA is showing the Ukrainians how to kill Russian people and destroy Russian assets. The CIA is an entity unto itself. It has sources of revenue outside the budget of the federal government, which makes that illegal and unconstitutional, directly on point. Federal law prohibiting this very thing. People who work for the government taking funds from sources other than the government to do government work or to do work in the name of the government.

They are a private army. They are deeply invested with MI6 in Ukraine. And Trump can do very, very little to stop them if he really tries to stop them. He probably doesn’t even know how. He would have to fire the senior level of CIA officials and the level below them. Firing the head of the CIA won’t change anything.

The current head of the CIA is a two-bit political hack, a former federal prosecutor and congressman from Texas who’s totally beholden to the senior level of career CIA officers and to the Mossad and to MI6. I don’t know if Trump even grasps all of this. If Trump were to leave office, I believe— I’m not a fan of J.D. Vance, but I believe he’s smart enough to understand all of this and would know how to unravel it.

J.D. Vance and the Republican Future

GLENN DIESEN (00:21:19 – 00:21:54): So yeah, I spoke to John Kiriakou, the former CIA counterterrorism chief who exposed the waterboarding and served a prison sentence over it. And he also made the point that the CIA always had its profound problems, but after 9/11, it just grew out of control in terms of unaccountability and of course becoming an army of its own.

So no, it’s, but do you think J.D. Vance, if he would be the next one to represent Republicans, would be someone who would address this issue in a sense.

JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO (00:21:54 – 00:24:22): You know, I mentioned Vice President Vance’s name only because he’s the vice president. He is one of the losers from yesterday because he was unable to deliver his own state. State of Ohio, the quintessential Republican state in Middle America. The other quintessential Republican state, Texas, also went to the Democrats, but in Ohio, the Democrat won for governor and the Democrat won for Vance’s old seat in the US Senate. So he is hurting this morning.

Just as an aside, somebody else that’s hurting is— it’s hard to imagine him hurting financially. Elon Musk, who dropped $275 million post-tax dollars into the Texas race. So he’s obviously not happy this morning, but Vance suffered an enormous setback.

So I don’t know if he’s going to be the Republican nominee. I don’t know if it’s going to be him or Marco Rubio, Chris Christie, somebody else that we’re not even thinking of right now. But whoever it is, I mean, unless you’re George H.W. Bush, who once ran the CIA, who knew all these senior people, who knew everything they did, who knew who to fire and who to keep on, who knew who to call on the phone.

Unless you have that level of familiarity with the intelligence community, which no American president except for George H.W. Bush has ever had, and which Donald Trump has less of than any other American president because he doesn’t like to read and he doesn’t like to listen to briefings. They’re not going to be stopped.

Now, if the Congress defunds them, that would be a very serious crisis for them. But I don’t know that that would happen because the intelligence community has a lot of dirt on a lot of members of Congress, which is why they keep getting more and more money. And it’s unaccountable and unconstitutional.

I say unconstitutional because the American Constitution says no money shall be spent from the public treasury except that which is recorded in a public journal. Where’s the journal that records what the CIA spends? If it exists, it’s under lock and key somewhere, and the president doesn’t have the key.

The Military-Industrial Complex and the Deep State

GLENN DIESEN (00:24:26 – 00:25:17): Is it besides the CIA though? Is it a problem that the permanent national security establishment has, well, essentially developed, I guess, institutional and economic interest in sustaining military confrontation. I mean, even if it wasn’t Trump, it must be difficult to be a peace president if you have that much economic interests built up around the intelligence arrangements and, of course, war.

I mean, people often point to Eisenhower’s farewell speech about the industrial complex, but even George Kennan in his book, he wrote a book, I think it came out in 1987, and he was essentially arguing that even if the Soviet Union would sink into the sea tomorrow, we would have to invent a new enemy very quickly because so much of the economy is tied up to this.

JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO (00:25:18 – 00:29:28): Yes, you’re 100% correct. And a lot of this, I’m putting my fingers together over my face. A lot of this is an amalgamation of the intelligence community and the military industrial complex. They feed off each other and it’s not just the CIA. There are 17 known and authorized and statutorily created intelligence agencies. There probably are others that we don’t know about, but it’s not just the CIA. There are other intelligence agencies that are at fault in this respect as well.

And they are tied up with foreign intelligence agencies. I mean, the CIA, you know this as well or better than I, the CIA and MI6 work hand in glove, and the CIA often works hand in glove with Mossad, and MI6 often works hand in glove with Mossad. Then there’s the Five Eyes, E-Y-E-S, Eyes, which is the English-speaking countries. So the US, Great Britain, New Zealand, Canada, and Australia. Which by statute share their intelligence information. So that creates another level of amalgamation with other intel agencies.

I mean, it is a vast, unaccountable, underground government within a government. I don’t want to sound like a conspiracy nut. I’m not one. But the more I talk to people like Larry Johnson and Scott Ritter and Alastair Crooke, the more I learn about how insidious this is, how broad-based it is, how unaccountable it is, how independent it is.

And again, unless you’re a President George H.W. Bush, unless we have some president who comes from this community, but like John Kiriakou and Larry Johnson, now renounces their former work and their former colleagues and understands what the intelligence community has done. Unless we have a president who has that mentality, which we certainly don’t have now, this is going to go on and on and on and get worse and worse and worse.

The Senator from— the senator-elect from Michigan, the Muslim physician, Abdul El-Sayed, ran against a guy named Mike Rogers. Now, I know Mike very well. Mike is a former FBI agent, former congressman, and when he was in Congress, he was the intelligence community’s guy. He was their point person. He believed that they could do no wrong. I rejoiced when he lost. Not that I agree with everything the victor has to say, but the last thing we need in the United States Senate is a former member of this community.

Nevertheless, they have so much information that so many people— the late, great Justice Scalia told me that the members of the court knew that they were being spied on. They knew that some entity in the government was capturing their keystrokes on their computers, much of which is very arcane academic analysis of the law, and their phone calls. But it is just reprehensible that the highest court in the land, an independent branch of government, is being spied on by the deep state, and they feel powerless to stop it.

GLENN DIESEN (00:29:30 – 00:30:42): I don’t think you have to be a conspiracy nut though, because I remember during the Russiagate years when was proven that intelligence agencies were sabotaging the Trump presidency. And at that time, when Trump pushed back, I remember in January of 2017, Senator Chuck Schumer he was arguing that, well, they tell that he should be careful, though. And he of course was an opponent of Trump, but he was making the point that if you try to take on the intelligence community— sorry— they will have “6 ways from Sunday” to getting back at you.

This was— I mean, for me, this was an astonishing remark. I know he was supposed to be in support of the intelligence services, but this claim that if the elected president, head of the executive branch, would go after the intelligence community and criticize them, they will get him. I mean, it suggests that they have an autonomous function, autonomous mandate, or even a policy. It is quite strange that this didn’t have more of a pushback.

Trump, the JFK Files, and “They”

JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO (00:30:42 – 00:32:21): Yeah, I’ll tell you a story. I’ve said this publicly, even though it involves a private conversation, and I’m going to have to go soon. But one of the last conversations I had with President Trump was in January of 2020, or excuse me, 2021. He was just about to leave office and Biden was just about to be inaugurated. And he called me up because he was about to pardon some people and several of them were my friends. And he wanted to tell me about it.

And then we had a conversation and then I’m not going to repeat that, but I did say to him, “You made one promise you didn’t come through on.” And he said, “Well, what’s that?” I said, “The JFK files, you never exposed them.” Now, eventually they were exposed and they had been denuded. There was nothing there, but that was 4, 8 years after, 4 years afterwards.

He said to me, “Judge, if they showed you what they showed me, you wouldn’t have exposed those files either.” So I said, and we’re on the phone, he’s in the White House, I’m in New Jersey or New York City. I said to him, “Who’s they and what did they show you?” And he said, “Someday when we’re together and there aren’t—” and then he raised his voice. “15 people listening to my phone calls, I will tell you.”

Well, I never was with him alone and he never told me. I don’t know if he was making it up or if there really is a they that threatened him.

Closing

GLENN DIESEN (00:32:24 – 00:32:28): Well, Judge, thank you so much for taking the time. I know you’re a busy man, so I appreciate it.

JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO (00:32:29 – 00:32:33): It’s a pleasure, Glenn. I look forward to seeing you on the other side of the camera soon.

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