Read the full transcript of journalist Max Blumenthal’s interview on Judging Freedom Podcast with host Judge Napolitano on “Max Blumenthal Reports: Charlie Kirk and the Israel Lobby!”, September 15, 2025.
The Investigation Begins
JUDGE NAPOLITANO: Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Monday, September 15, 2025. Max Blumenthal is here with a report of his latest investigations on the events leading up to the murder of Charlie Kirk. Max, you’ve been doing unbelievable investigative reporting. What have you learned?
MAX BLUMENTHAL: Well, following my September 12th report, which provided background about the pressure, the mounting pressure that Charlie Kirk was under from pro-Israel forces, from Netanyahu’s cutouts in the United States, I gathered more details. The piece hit like a sledgehammer. It really caused a lot of… I think it spoke for a lot of people, particularly within the conservative movement, which is changing among the youth on the question of Israel.
More people started coming out and more people started talking. And people were talking to me. These were people who had knowledge of a tumultuous, stormy meeting held in the Hamptons during the first week of August, convened according to multiple sources with knowledge of this meeting, intimate knowledge of this meeting by the billionaire ultra-Zionist financier Bill Ackman, who is close to Netanyahu and his network in the United States.
The Hamptons Meeting
Charlie Kirk was summoned along with an array of young, sort of vapid, very avaricious conservative influencers who seemed to be sort of in Israel’s back pocket to set a very pro-Israel tone for this meeting. Charlie Kirk was, according to one source, hammered by Ackman and others for allowing Israel critics, very prominent conservative voices like Megyn Kelly, Tucker Carlson, or the anti-Zionist Jewish comedian Dave Smith to appear at his events.
Actually, Charlie Kirk was planning to host many of these same figures again in December. He had just added to his TPUSA major – I think it’s called America Fest in December – the premier critic of Israel in Congress. I didn’t say Republican critic. I just said premier critic because that’s what she is now, Marjorie Taylor Greene, which really reflected his shifting views.
Ackman, according to multiple sources, had this meeting to basically bully Charlie Kirk into submission. Charlie Kirk walked away, according to one person, feeling like there was an attempt to blackmail him. He refused any offers of funding and also refused the offer to travel to Israel and meet with Netanyahu, which Netanyahu disclosed in the immediate wake of Netanyahu’s death. He talked about this letter, but he didn’t say whether Charlie Kirk refused or accepted. I’ve learned since that he refused.
Kirk’s Spiritual Transformation
Beyond that, he was becoming so alienated by this crowd of pro-Israel enforcers that he was moving away from the Protestant church. This is what I’ve been told. Candace Owens just disclosed this on her live stream. He was a Protestant who, as a young conservative voice, and I believe an evangelical Christian.
JUDGE NAPOLITANO: He was a Christian nationalist by his own words.
MAX BLUMENTHAL: Yes. And he was pushing the idea of this Judeo-Christian alliance and that was like music to the ears of the pro-Israel funders. But now he was starting to attend Catholic mass with his wife Erika and moving in a different direction, what Candace Owens called a spiritual transformation. The Catholics just don’t have that same conceptualization of American Christian nationalism and the Judeo-Christian Alliance.
JUDGE NAPOLITANO: Correct.
MAX BLUMENTHAL: This has never been reported before. So he was undergoing a transformation, a singular figure in the Trump world, unreplaceable, sort of a unique figure in that world. And he was moving on this question and there really wasn’t anything they could do to stop him because you couldn’t just… I mean, I’m sure there would have been an attempt, and there already was through figures like Ben Shapiro and Mark Levin at Fox News, to attack him and sort of suggest maybe he should be removed.
But you can’t really just remove someone like that who’s built this entire gigantic infrastructure around himself. So we really don’t know where things would have gone. But these two stories together I think paint a picture of a wider history of where the conservative movement itself is going. The astroturfing from pro-Israel one percenters to prevent that.
The Catholic Connection
JUDGE NAPOLITANO: This will undermine Trump’s support on this issue substantially. So his good buddy, the Vice President of the United States, is a Catholic convert. Candace Owens is a Catholic convert. Mrs. Kirk is a born and raised Roman Catholic. This probably terrified the Christian nationalists, the Mike Huckabee types and their wealthy American, mainly New York Zionist financiers. Do we know from your sources what Kirk himself thought of Netanyahu? Did he feel intimidated by Netanyahu?
MAX BLUMENTHAL: Yes, absolutely. And I think the reason that people initially, anyone initially started talking to me was that Netanyahu came out while Charlie Kirk’s body was still warm and started lying about him and trying to recast him as his best friend.
Now, it’s true. Charlie Kirk was, until fairly recently, certainly before October 7, 2023, the most important gentile asset that Israel might have had today, possibly more important than Trump, because Charlie Kirk was preaching the pro-Israel gospel to young people and he was potentially on his way to becoming president or senator, someone very important to Israel.
Kirk’s View of Netanyahu
So as soon as he starts to make some noises after October 7 about Israel’s misdeeds, but particularly about Israel’s malign influence in Washington, and then he experienced the pressure from pro-Israel donors like Bill Ackman, Netanyahu enters the picture. Charlie Kirk, according to a longtime friend of his who I spoke to, considered Netanyahu a disgusting bully who was a manipulator and was fundamentally dishonest.
This stands at complete odds with the picture Netanyahu has tried to paint in not just one, but I think five or maybe six tweets since Charlie Kirk was killed.
Additionally, I think it’s important to recognize what Netanyahu was doing. He was trying to do the same thing he did after 9/11 when the Israeli publication Ma’ariv reported in 2008 that Netanyahu said 9/11 is good for Israel.
He wanted to exploit Charlie Kirk’s killing in a way that benefited Israel by pushing a narrative of religious warfare and Islamophobia inside the US and he blamed Islam and radical Muslims and the left for killing Charlie Kirk before the suspect was even known, before anyone had even been caught. So the truth and the reality about Charlie Kirk’s relationship with Netanyahu turns Netanyahu’s whole sectarian, militaristic narrative on its head.
Kirk Speaks Out Against His Critics
JUDGE NAPOLITANO: Here’s Charlie Kirk in August talking to Megyn Kelly, my friend and former colleague, about the people that are attacking him.
VIDEO CLIP BEGINS:
CHARLIE KIRK: I think I have a bulletproof resume showing my defense of Israel both on campus, on social media, to great… let’s just say mockery and scorn at times where I… because I believe it. However, Megyn, you’re hitting on something very potent and important.
Now let me first say I don’t want to judge an entire group because there’s been many people in the pro-Israel world that have been very sweet, very kind, very nuanced, very “Charlie, you know, you’re with us. You don’t have to agree all the time.”
However, and I will say this, the behavior by a lot, both privately and publicly are pushing people like you and me away. My moral character is now being put into question, Megyn, not my decisions. Not like, “hey, are you doing this? Is it smart or is it dumb?” But no, I am a bad person if I do this.
I could go… I mean, you saw it, Megyn. It was trending on Twitter, thousands of tweets and text messages. And if I were to be charitable and generous, I will say the people that are attacking me are in a hyper-paranoid state because they’re at war, and war tends to make things black and white, and you’re a hammer looking for a nail. So I’m trying to be charitable, Megyn. Literally, I’m trying to cut as much slack as I can.
I have less ability sometimes online to criticize the Israeli government about backlash than actual Israelis do. And that’s really, really weird, isn’t it, Megyn? That’s not right.
Personality types like you, myself, and Tucker. The more that you guys privately and publicly call our character into question, which is not isolated, right, Megyn? It would be one thing if it was one text or two texts. It is dozens of texts. When the hostile reaction is that now Megyn and Charlie are enemies. Boy, I’ll tell you, like you’re going to… you’re not going to… I won’t say lose, but you will weaken and just basically deflate two of your strongest advocates if that continues.
VIDEO CLIP ENDS:
Right about the time that he was summoned to the Hamptons by Ackman and company.
The Hamptons Meeting Details
MAX BLUMENTHAL: Yeah, I believe that was August 6th when he said that. I struggled to pinpoint the precise date of the meeting, but it was right around that time because I managed to dredge up Instagram photos from some of the influencers who I confirmed to be at the meeting, especially photos by someone named Xavier de Rousseau, who I’d say very few people watching this have probably heard of.
JUDGE NAPOLITANO: No, I never heard of him.
MAX BLUMENTHAL: I hadn’t heard much about him before I reached him on the phone. Like everyone else who attended this meeting that I reached, he was flustered, freaked out by my call, immediately went silent. He was in a state of panic. They’re all nervous about being identified with this meeting.
Xavier Derusseau is an employee of PragerU, which is this conservative indoctrination outlet that focuses on youth, including young people.
JUDGE NAPOLITANO: This is another Christian nationalist gaggle run…
MAX BLUMENTHAL: By Marissa Streit, who is a Jewish Zionist who served in Israel’s Unit 8200 cyber spying division. Xavier Derusseau was sent with Israeli government money to a Gaza humanitarian foundation site two weeks after that meeting in the Hamptons, where he mocked the famine in Gaza in very disgusting fashion. Said Hamas leaders are on Ozempic because they’re getting so fat off all the food they’re getting.
That’s his role. That’s the role of many of the other influencers who are sent there. That’s what Charlie Kirk was surrounded by there, along with Bill Ackman, who apparently organized this entire thing, who has been just since October 7th strong-arming his way through institutions across this country to bully them into pro-Israel submission.
Apparently his next target was Charlie Kirk because of what Charlie Kirk was doing at TPUSA, specifically allowing Tucker Carlson to come on stage and referring to Bill Ackman as a Jeffrey Epstein associate who was a scam artist and a charlatan who had made his money through nebulous means. So it all kind of fits together.
Netanyahu’s Unusual Denial
JUDGE NAPOLITANO: Why do you think Netanyahu felt the need to go on national television and expressly deny Israel assassinated Kirk? I mean, who does that?
MAX BLUMENTHAL: Yeah, why do millions of people… I mean, you see it all over social media. They think Israel had some involvement because of the way they’ve been conducting themselves around the world in the region. Netanyahu is not just waging a seven-front war. He’s carrying out an assassination spree in broad daylight all across the region, including inside a U.S. ally.
You have this record of Charlie Kirk, which backs up everything I heard on background going out in public. You can see he’s anguished, he’s angry. He’s almost on the verge of going crazy because he’s under so much pressure from Netanyahu’s cutouts in the United States.
So people are taking the reality to another level where it’s an unsubstantiated theory. I have no evidence that Israel had any role in Charlie Kirk’s assassination. But they’re taking it there because of what they know about Israel and its capabilities and its ruthlessness, along with the fact that the official story just keeps collapsing and is so murky and filled with contradictions that no one knows really what to make of any of this.
Trump’s Fear of Netanyahu
JUDGE NAPOLITANO: Did you learn from your sources if Kirk believed that President Trump was frightened of Benjamin Netanyahu?
MAX BLUMENTHAL: Well, I didn’t… I don’t know what Kirk thought, and I’ve never met him, even though I’ve been following him for about 10 years. One of my sources knows people in the White House. I mean, the Trump White House is very accessible, I should say. I’ve gotten sources in there like very good sources, and I can tell you some of the things that they’ve been saying.
But this one particular source has said that… and this is something I’ve been hearing around Trump’s circle for years. Trump was always afraid of assassination because of all the attacks that he was under, because he was always compared to Hitler and so on. Then he faces a real assassination attempt. So of course he’s afraid of that.
He’s very afraid of Netanyahu and his capabilities. During one of Netanyahu’s many trips to Washington this year, Israeli agents placed electronic devices on Secret Service emergency response vehicles on two separate occasions. This is what a source told me.
JUDGE NAPOLITANO: Did the Secret Service arrest these Israeli agents?
Surveillance Devices and Foreign Intelligence Operations
MAX BLUMENTHAL: They found the devices and this is what I was told by a Trump insider. So I can’t call up. If I called up the Secret Service and asked them to confirm this, they just wouldn’t even acknowledge it. It’s not something that’s going to happen.
But there’s a precedent there. The precedent is in 2019, three high ranking former U.S. officials told POLITICO that Israel had done the exact same thing, placing Stingray cell phone surveillance devices around the White House and in sensitive locations throughout Washington to surveil Donald Trump’s phone communications.
Now, who would get access to those locations first of all? You can’t just send Shlomo Mossad up in there. He’s not going to get access. But Benjamin Netanyahu has access and his own security team. And actually, in 2017, Boris Johnson, the former British Prime Minister, wrote in his memoir that Netanyahu went into his personal toilet and left a surveillance device, a listening device, that British security, his personal security, found a listening device after Netanyahu used his personal toilet. This was reported in the Telegraph, the British Telegraph, which is a pro Israel publication.
So I would have just dismissed this. But there’s just such a strong precedent there and it frightens people inside the White House when you have this foreign intelligence agency which is carrying out a genocide, which can basically fund your campaigns through cutouts like Miriam Adelson. Netanyahu is calling into the White House demanding personnel changes all the time. That’s what I’ve heard.
And you think you can defy them and not provide them weapons when they are in this war that they think is the most important existential war in the history of Israel. No, you can’t just do that. So it stands to reason that Trump is afraid. And that’s what I was told by an insider with access to Trump.
JUDGE NAPOLITANO: You think more is going to come out on all this? You’ve been researching this since Charlie was murdered for four days now.
The Collapse of the US-Israel Special Relationship
MAX BLUMENTHAL: Well, it’s not just — after I put out the first story, I just started getting more information that I never expected to have that dovetailed with rumors that I was seeing on social media and provided detail to them. And this, I think, is kind of just, it’s a history about this US Israel special relationship that’s being uncovered right now, that shows just how it’s collapsed, is completely collapsed.
Because when you. I think when you lose Charlie Kirk, I don’t mean physically, but when you lose. When they lost him politically, or if they lost him politically, and he starts refusing your funding, refusing Netanyahu’s offer to fund his organization to the hilt, which was what I told he did, then you’ve lost the game.
JUDGE NAPOLITANO: Did he refuse to fly to Israel and meet with Netanyahu?
MAX BLUMENTHAL: That’s what I was told. And that’s what Candace Owens, who is a lot closer to Charlie Kirk than me, just said on her live stream, that he rejected that offer. So Netanyahu delivered a video eulogy to Charlie Kirk and held this letter that he said he sent him, inviting him to Israel, to Jerusalem, two weeks before his death. Why would you do that if Charlie Kirk refused? Like, how much of a sick sociopath do you have to be?
But then again, Bill Ackman, the day after Charlie Kirk was killed, took to Twitter X to declare that he had a meal this summer with Charlie Kirk and spent time with him. And he was a giant of a man. I mean, how deranged do you have to be to say that when the reality was that this was described as an intervention in which Charlie Kirk was hammered by Bill Ackman and put under all this pressure which poured out into that Megyn Kelly interview? I mean, we’re not dealing. We’re dealing with real sociopaths here.
FBI Transparency Concerns
JUDGE NAPOLITANO: Max, you are second to none when it comes to the skullduggery. You go through your personal courage and your understanding of all of these profound issues and interrelated factors here. I can’t thank you enough. I know you’re going to be doing some other things for a day or so, but if more of this comes out and you want this audience, please let us know you. You have it at your disposal.
MAX BLUMENTHAL: Let me just say one thing that I’ve been hearing from a Trump administration source, like someone who’s in the white Trump administration official, and I’ve heard this from other areas close to the Trump administration, which is that they don’t really feel like they’re hearing enough from the FBI. The FBI is not being transparent. And that’s the way that the American people feel about this. And so the longer that goes on.
JUDGE NAPOLITANO: Oh, transparent over what?
MAX BLUMENTHAL: They’re not sharing information. They’re not. Like, they want to see, like, video of the muzzle flash from the roof and see where the shot came from. And since that’s not forthcoming, even at the highest level, the public is becoming more, I hate to say it, but conspiratorial. And this is just going to fester until we get some answers.
So what we need are answers. And we need a real investigation into this. And we need a real investigation into the Ryan Ruth assassination attempt since he was connected to Ukraine and its international legion and was having meetings on Capitol Hill. It’s very strange how that one was buried as well as the Butler, Pennsylvania shooting. That one just kind of went away.
Questions About the Official Story
JUDGE NAPOLITANO: Do the people in the White House fear that Robinson did not pull the trigger that propelled the fatal shot?
MAX BLUMENTHAL: I think that anyone who’s not getting answers, who’s in the administration has a lot of suspicion and questions about what’s going on. But let me again say I’m totally content to believe the official story if it’s proven, if it’s demonstrated, if we get some evidence. But where is that?
And additionally, I have no evidence that Israel played any role. I’m not here saying that. But consider how the public is going to react here when we live in this digital Panopticon where everything around us is filmed through active or passive surveillance. Cell phones were everywhere filming Charlie Kirk along with real cameras. And we still have missing angles.
JUDGE NAPOLITANO: So about two hours ago, Dan Bongino told Fox News that they’re looking for an accomplice.
MAX BLUMENTHAL: I don’t even know who to trust. I mean, do we trust this podcaster guy? But yeah, he’s a podcaster guy, but.
JUDGE NAPOLITANO: He’s number two in the FBI. Well, he’s certainly unhappy, but he’s there.
MAX BLUMENTHAL: And Kash Patel said that there was a manifesto left by Tyler Robinson, but it has disappeared or destroyed and they’re going to try to forensically reconstruct it. Look, everything could come together by tomorrow, but right now there isn’t enough there to clearly convict a lone wolf shooter. And therefore, the public is going to develop its own theories.
JUDGE NAPOLITANO: Thank you, Max. Thanks for all your work. Thanks for the privilege of having you break this news right here, a forum that is always available to you even though you have your own enormous forum. My best to you and your family.
MAX BLUMENTHAL: Thanks a lot, Judge.
JUDGE NAPOLITANO: Of course. Well, coming up tomorrow on all of this at 8 in the morning, Ambassador Chaz Freeman at 11 in the morning, Max, wonderful colleague Aaron Mate at 3 in the afternoon, Colonel Karen Kwatkowski and all of your Judging Freedom favorites by the end of the week, Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom.
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