Judge Napolitano: The U.S. Will Go Bankrupt, Collapse & Break Up (Transcript)

I can guess that the deep state, the intelligence community, the parts of the government that never change – the intelligence community, the bankers, the military – I wouldn’t say threatened, but pressure American presidents, probably by scaring them into complying with the wishes of the deep state and the military industrial complex, because it happens over and over and over again.

We have the uniparty, a derogatory phrase to describe the areas where Republicans and Democrats agree, and war is one of them. We have been fighting the forever wars since the end of World War II. I don’t even know what the number is. But it’s rare that there’s been a time where there hasn’t been some war going on since 1945.

So it’s a problem that no one’s been able to solve. It would take a serious pro-peace libertarian like Ron Paul, who’s past his years for running for office, or Thomas Massie, his ideological successor in the House. It would take a person like that, I think, to resist the entreaties and coercions and perhaps threats, but I’m not personally aware of any that come from the deep state to American presidents.

Surveillance Laws and Congressional Coercion

The same thing happens in America with surveillance. These laws that permit the Feds to capture every keystroke on every mobile device and every laptop in the country – they all have a sunset. So every year, every five years, those laws are about to expire, and people stand on the floor of the House of Representatives in the Senate saying, “I’m not voting for this. This is against the Constitution. This is not why we have America.”

And then they get a visit in their office by the intelligence community, which swears them to secrecy before the visit. That’s a bad start to a visit. Somebody’s going to come into your office and say, “You can’t tell anybody what I’m about to tell you.” I would say leave the office. Nevertheless, they swear them to secrecy, and then they come out of the office and they’ve changed their minds, and we don’t know what they were told or what they saw.

Trump’s Revelation About the JFK Files

Similar to a conversation I had with President Trump at the end of his first term. He had called me to ask my opinion of some pardons and commutations he was about to issue, because I knew some of these people. And I said, “How you doing?” Now, this was the era where this is a week before Biden was going to be inaugurated. Trump was still telling everybody that he really won the election in 2020. So “I’m not doing too well. I won the election, and you know it.”

And I didn’t want to get into a dispute with him. I said, “You know, you have two days left in your presidency, and there’s a couple of things that you promised that you didn’t do. What?” “Well, one thing is to release the JFK files. Another thing is to pardon Julian Assange, who then was still in jeopardy, and Edward Snowden.” I thought I had talked him into pardoning Snowden and Assange. Not the point of my story.

But I said, “What about the JFK files?” And he said to me, “Judge, if they showed you what they showed me, you wouldn’t release those files either.” And I said, “Well, who’s they and what did they show you?” And he said, “Someday when we’re talking and there aren’t 15 people listening to the phone call, I’ll tell you.” Well, he never did.

So apparently, in his view, or at least he wanted me to think this, somebody in the military showed him something so horrible that it made him rethink that, whether it was a direct threat or a veiled threat or just a picture of JFK’s brains blown out. I don’t know. So threats, coercion, fear, promises – these all rule the day in the American government.

Intelligence Agencies Out of Control

GLENN DIESEN: Well, you’ve always been quite concerned about the constitutional overreach as a source of getting United States into trouble abroad as well. But on the topic of Trump and the intelligence agencies, to what extent do you think the lack of oversight of what intelligence agencies do is a growing problem? Because this really came out in the media with the Russiagate scandal, in which the intelligence agencies seem to come after Trump in a very big way. I’m not sure if he shared any of his perspectives on this with you.

JUDGE NAPOLITANO: He has shared those perspectives with me. And it’s nothing different from what you’ve heard him say publicly. You know, the intelligence community is radically out of control. When George W. Bush realized that the NSA, that’s America’s domestic spying apparatus, which employs 60,000 people – that’s 10 times the number of FBI agents that there are. The federal government employs spies to spy on us domestically.

When George W. Bush learned that the NSA was in the Defense Department, he told the head of the NSA, “You don’t have to worry about the Constitution because I’m your boss and as Commander in Chief, I don’t have to worry about the Constitution.” Both of those statements were erroneous under basic Supreme Court rulings and constitutional law. But it shows you an attitude on the part of people in the government that they don’t have to follow the Constitution.

The Patriot Act’s Constitutional Violations

The Patriot Act, which is a horrible piece of legislation that allows federal agents to bypass the Fourth Amendment. Under the Fourth Amendment, only a judge can issue a search warrant based on probable cause of crime. The Patriot Act allows one FBI agent to authorize another FBI agent to prepare his own search warrant. They don’t call it search warrant. They call it National Security letters, but it has the same effect.

This went into existence in 2001. That’s 24 years ago. A whole generation of spies and federal agents have come of age being taught, “Don’t worry about the Constitution, just get this stuff done. We’ll deal with the constitutional matters later.”

So now we have spying on everybody and we have cutting constitutional corners. I mean, if you think that I’m a bank robber and you want to know what I’m doing with the money and you want to look at my bank account, why bother going to a judge and demonstrating probable cause, which takes hours or even days, when all you have to do is hack into my bank account and you can see what’s there?

Never mind that computer hacking is a felony for which the FBI prosecutes people. They themselves do it all the time because it’s easier, faster and cheaper than complying with the Constitution. So the Constitution formally still exists. We still have three branches of government, we still have an independent life tenure judiciary, we still have a presidency, we still have a Congress with two houses. But functionally it doesn’t exist because very few people follow it.

CIA Operations and the Ukraine Coup

GLENN DIESEN: Well, this is very concerning. It must be for Americans as well, that intelligence agencies have taken on a life of their own that is not just being an instrument, but almost having their own politics, which is pretty much a good definition of a deep state. But do you link this to the current military involvements the United States is in, such as the Ukraine war?

Because it appears, well, at least according to New York Times, that the day after the coup that toppled Yanukovych back in 2014, the first thing the new intelligence chief of Ukraine did was he came in and he called up MI6 and CIA and they began to recreate the intelligence agencies from scratch because they’d been a bit too close to the Russians and indeed they’d been working. They had considered the Russians their closest partners until a few days before. So I was wondering how do you see this involvement of the intelligence agencies in terms of shaping the conflict?

JUDGE NAPOLITANO: Well, you know, there really are two CIAs in the United States. There are the spies who gather data, which the American federal government actually needs in order to know what dangers are out there. But it’s the operations part of the CIA that is horrific and dangerous. These are the people that perpetrated the coup in 2014 and they continue to do so around the world.

When Barack Obama bombed Libya, drove Colonel Gaddafi from office and he was eventually slaughtered in a public square – this is Clinton boasted, “We came, we bombed, he died” – President Obama did not use the military, he used the CIA. Now they look like military. They have weapons and equipment like military. They had jet planes with missiles on them, but they’re not military because the law in America for the use of the military requires consent of Congress. But the CIA works directly for the President.

So the President now has his own private secret army that he can use to kill people however he wants, never authorized by legislation, just morphed into the operations branch of the CIA. And no president, not even the current one, who’s been victimized by this – spies didn’t harm him, it’s the operations people who did – no president has put a stop to it. So I don’t see things getting any better. I see government growing and liberty shrinking.

America’s Debt Crisis and Inevitable Collapse

Now, the United States government may die a natural death because it won’t be able to pay its debts. I mean, it owes $37 trillion. That will be $40 trillion when Trump leaves office. Now, you can do the math. The debt service on $40 trillion a year is over a trillion. No society could survive very long having that kind of debt service.

If Trump repudiates the debt, that might be a very good thing. But a lot of people and governments and institutions will be out of luck. And then nobody will ever lend money to the American government again, and it will be forced to live within its means or tax people to death. And then there’ll be a revolution. So one way or another, this will stop. I don’t know if it’ll stop in my lifetime, but it probably will in yours.

GLENN DIESEN: Yeah, this is a concern because it appears we’re moving towards another big financial crisis. Probably sped ahead with these tariffs. But if there’s a crisis in the dollar and it’s attempted to be saved by increasing the interest rates, it’s going to make it impossible to service the debt. So it’s just looks like we’re moving towards a crisis which can’t really be resolved.

Trump’s Economic Illiteracy and Tariff Policies

JUDGE NAPOLITANO: We have a president – you’ve heard me say this when you’re on my show, and I’m deeply grateful for every time you come on – we have a president who doesn’t understand Economics 101. He doesn’t understand basic economics, that a tariff is a sales tax paid by the ultimate consumer. And you’re beginning to see prices rise in this country, not radically, not dramatically, but slowly and across the board. And it will reach its peak probably a year from now.

What’ll be happening a year from now? The midterm elections where the Democrats hope to take back the Congress. And if they do, it’ll be because Donald Trump handed it to them on a silver platter.

GLENN DIESEN: Initially, I gave him the benefit of the doubt on the tariffs because I’ve always been a big fan of the American system – Alexander Hamilton, Henry Clay. And if you use limited tariffs in order to give some competitive advantage to growing domestic industry. But it has to be a strategic one, capable of competing in international markets if it gets a little bit of help with temporary subsidies and tariffs. But this is just across the board, using it as a political weapon. I mean, it’s just going to push the cost on the consumer, it seems from the constitutional perspective.

Constitutional Challenges and Presidential Overreach

JUDGE NAPOLITANO: We talked about the Constitution a few minutes ago, a tariff is a tax. Only Congress can impose a tax that’s been ruled on by a lower federal court. And a federal appeals court, I think, will uphold that ruling very soon, literally very soon, because they said their decision would be out before Labor Day, which is two weeks from yesterday. So that go to the Supreme Court.

I don’t know what the economic consequences will be if all those tariffs are invalidated. And the Congress will never vote for tariffs now because the Republicans have too many personal vows that they took never to raise taxes, no matter what. So I don’t know what the outcome of this will be, but it won’t be good. And it’ll be because of Trump.

I mean, it’s one thing for the Congress to impose a tariff for the reasons you articulated, although in my heart of hearts, I’m Randian as an Ayn Rand, I don’t believe in any government regulation of the economy, but the economics is not my field. But it’s entirely another thing for the president to impose tariffs on his own. I mean, he threatened a tariff on Brazil because he doesn’t like the prosecution of the former president, President of Brazil. What does that have to do with American economics? Nothing.

GLENN DIESEN: It’s quite extraordinary. Well, the way he’s ruled a bit like a king by using this tariffs not coming from Congress. I wanted to go back a bit to this intelligence agencies, because in this first administration, you had Senator Chuck Schumer warning Trump that, you know, the intelligence community, they have “six ways from Sundays to get back at you” if you’re trying to make any troubles with them.

I mean, this should have made alarm bells go off when leading senators recognized that, yeah, the intelligence agencies more or less operate on their own now. But has Trump done anything in order to push back against those who went against him? Because Tulsi Gabbard, she began now to release some files from the Russiagate hoax. And I thought the intelligence agencies were very much front and center in this. Has there been any real consequences?

Intelligence Agencies and Surveillance State

JUDGE NAPOLITANO: If Trump were interested in prosecuting the people that went after him, he would had to have done it in his first term and he would had to have had his then Director of National Intelligence release it. What Tulsi Gabbard released cannot form the basis of a prosecution because of the passage of time, the statute of limitations. She knew that.

So the release that she made two or three weeks ago was to get this Jeffrey Epstein story off the front page. It’s not going to result in any legislation, it’s certainly not going to result in any prosecution. The statute of limitations is five years. Her predecessor, I don’t even remember who it was, who was the Director of National Intelligence in Trump’s first term. That person would had to have released all of this. So this is not going to go anywhere.

And when Chuck Schumer said there are “six ways on Sundays for them to get you,” that’s 100% correct, because they listen to every phone call and catch every keystroke, even the ones you think you’ve deleted, by the way, on every mobile device and every desktop in the country. They know everybody’s secrets.

I mean, Americans, particularly here, where I live in New York City, are the most surveilled people on the planet. I think it’s now worse here than in London. And everybody takes it for granted. You sort of forget about it and act yourself. You know, the Heisenberg effect, a thing under observation, changes on account of its awareness of the observation. True, but after a while, you forget about the observation. You don’t change your behavior, you act normally and they catch you.

I mean, the late Justice Antonin Scalia, a dear friend of mine during the last 10 years of his life, told me that the Court, the Supreme Court of the United States, was being surveilled by the NSA, and members of the Court knew it. Oh, my God. If they can spy on the Supreme Court of the United States, they can spy on the President, and they probably do.

GLENN DIESEN: But why the. Where are the main incentives, though, for the, again, American intelligence agencies to spy on the Supreme Court of the United States? Is it to have something compromising on them, to control them, a bit like a big Epstein operation?

JUDGE NAPOLITANO: It’s to have leverage. Should the Court be on the verge of doing something? I mean, for example, the Constitution guarantees the right to privacy in persons, houses, papers and effects. So I was once interrogating Justice Scalia back when I was a law professor at Brooklyn Law School, and there were 2,500 people in the audience.

And I said, “Justice Scalia, in this mobile device is a computer chip. Is it an effect?” And he laughed and he goes, “I better not answer that one, because it might be coming to the Court.” Suppose the Court were about to declare that a computer chip is an effect, in Madison’s terminology when he wrote the Fourth Amendment. Then all spying is illegal and it can only be done pursuant to a search warrant issued by a federal judge based on probable cause of crime. I could see the intelligence community using whatever leverage it had on members of the court to prevent them from issuing such an opinion.

The Epstein Connection and Foreign Intelligence

GLENN DIESEN: But when there is major intelligence operations within the United States. Again, we don’t know if Jeffrey Epstein was Mossad spy, but let’s assume he would be, how likely is it that he would operate solely on behalf of Israel? There wouldn’t be any partnership with the United States. I mean, this. We’re going into the realm of speculation, of course, but how do you see this?

JUDGE NAPOLITANO: Well, our mutual friend Max Blumenthal makes a very strong case that Epstein was an asset, not an agent, that he was on the payroll, but an asset paid from time to time of Mossad. And the CIA knew it and worked hand in glove with Mossad. What services Epstein provided for Mossad and for CIA? I don’t know. Maybe again, there’s dirt on Bill Clinton, for example, in an effort to control his behavior.

Now, I don’t think Clinton had anything to do with Epstein until after he was in the White House. So what good would it be to blackmail Clinton if he’s no longer in office? And I’ve never seen the so called client list, so I don’t know who’s on it. The Mossad is very good at using blackmail, but they’re not profligate. They’re not going to waste their money. They’re going to pay Epstein only if he can produce for them.

So how he produced and what he produced, I don’t know. This could turn out to be nothing. It could also turn out that living and deceased members of Congress were blackmailed by Mossad in the years that they were in office.

JFK Files and Government Secrecy

GLENN DIESEN: This is, yeah, that would be very big, but this is this whole new revelation that we now see the, what the intelligence agencies are possibly involved in. You mentioned before the JFK files that Trump told you. If, you know, we know what’s inside the wouldn’t want it to be released either. But I thought some of these files had been released now.

JUDGE NAPOLITANO: Well, they’ve been sanitized. I mean, a former Director of National Intelligence, not Tulsi Gabbard, but one of her predecessors told me that he had seen the JFK file and there was nothing there. I said, “How can there be nothing there?” He said, “Well, the people in whose custody it has been since 1963 made sure that there’s nothing there.” And there’s been nothing there since long before Trump was in the White House. So when they did release the JFK files, it was a ho hum. It was nothing.

GLENN DIESEN: So we haven’t learned anything from the release? Anything of significance?

JUDGE NAPOLITANO: No. You know I’m not a JFK assassination expert, but my recollection is that there was some memoranda in there showing more involvement between Lee Harvey Oswald and CIA officials then had been known. But no smoking gun whatsoever. No instructions to Oswald to be at Dealey Plaza at one in the afternoon on November 22, 1963. No smoking gun.

Threats to Liberty and Constitutional Order

GLENN DIESEN: My last question is, I guess I have a very broad one. What are you seeing being the main threats to liberty today in the United States given this constitutional overreach and deep state? Well, what is it that threatens liberty?

JUDGE NAPOLITANO: Well, the Congress refuses to do its job and it lets the President. It cedes power to the President. That impairs liberty. Right now he wants to become the police Commissioner of Washington D.C. Chicago, Los Angeles and New York City. The courts don’t enforce the Constitution as it was written. The military industrial complex and the Zionist lobby have ironclad grips on the Congress.

So the military industrial complex still is the beneficiary of now a trillion dollar annual budget, which of course is absurd. That’s more than the next 10 countries combined, which includes Russia and China, of course. The absence of constitutional norms, all these things, and debt, all these things are going to bring down the American government, probably debt before the others.

Predictions of American Collapse and Fragmentation

GLENN DIESEN: So you predict the collapse of the American government within the foreseeable century.

JUDGE NAPOLITANO: The collapse of the federal government and the United States breaking off into I don’t know how many, a dozen or so smaller republics.

GLENN DIESEN: So the breakup of the United States as well.

JUDGE NAPOLITANO: Yes, yes, because it won’t be able to pay its bills, it won’t be able to pay a salary. No one will want to work for it. No one want to lend money to it. People to whom it owes money will be out of luck. It’d be like suing the Confederacy after the Civil War because you made them a loan. The federal courts wouldn’t even hear the suits.

GLENN DIESEN: So who. Sorry, just one last question. Who do you think would break off first? This is like Texas or How do you see this fragmenting?

JUDGE NAPOLITANO: Well, this is just speculation on my part, but it would be regional and it would be ideological. So New England would probably be its own small republic. Texas would be its own. Georgia, South Carolina and Florida would be one. I don’t know where my home state of New Jersey would end up. Probably wherever New York goes.

But these are the things that will probably happen. I mean, people will wake up and they’ll still be able to go to supermarkets and they’ll be able to go to church and they’ll be able to go to work. There’ll just be no federal government anymore. Will someone move in on and take the place of it? Who knows?

GLENN DIESEN: Judge Napolitano, I’m a huge fan. So this has been a real privilege for you, for you to come on my channel. So thank you so much.

JUDGE NAPOLITANO: The fandom is bilateral, and I look forward to seeing you on with me later this week. Thank you, Professor.

GLENN DIESEN: Thank you.

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