Editor’s Notes: In this January 2026 episode of Judging Freedom, Judge Andrew Napolitano and Professor Jeffrey Sachs examine the Trump administration’s aggressive use of “economic statecraft” as a weapon against nations like Iran and Venezuela. Professor Sachs deconstructs recent admissions by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, arguing that the deliberate destabilization of foreign currencies constitutes an illegal form of warfare that bypasses Congressional authority. The conversation further explores domestic civil rights concerns and the global shift away from the U.S. dollar as nations seek to insulate themselves from American economic pressure. Additionally, Sachs discusses the implications of TikTok’s ownership change on free speech and the reporting of international conflicts. (Jan 27, 2026)
TRANSCRIPT:
“Undeclared wars are commonplace. Tragically, our government engages in preemptive war, otherwise known as aggression, with no complaints from the American people. Sadly, we have become accustomed to living with the illegitimate use of force by government. To develop a truly free society, the issue of initiating force must be understood. Reject it.”
“What if sometimes to love your country, you had to alter or abolish the government? What if Jefferson was right? What if that government is best which governs least? What if it is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong? What if it is better to perish fighting for freedom than to live as a slave? What if freedom’s greatest hour of danger is now?”
—
Introduction: Economic Warfare and Domestic Militarization
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Tuesday, January 27, 2026. Professor Jeff Sachs will be with us in just a moment on using the economy as a weapon. What is economic statecraft, and how can it be as perilous as warfare?
Professor Sachs, welcome here, my dear friend. Before we get to the U.S. Treasury working hand in glove with the CIA to destabilize society and even starve people in Iran, hasn’t the Trump administration descended into a form of nihilism in Minneapolis when it can defend shooting a young man in the back nine times because he had the temerity to photograph, to video ICE people as they were in the streets?
JEFFREY SACHS: Trump is at war with the world, including at war with American citizens, including militarizing American society in an absolutely shocking and brutal way. And what’s part of this is that the government, including, of course, the President personally, but the government lies at every single moment about everything.
There isn’t a truthful word about what’s happening internationally or what’s happening on our streets. We can watch directly the history of these killings in Minneapolis, or we can know, if we work hard at it, what’s really happening internationally. But the government itself simply lies, brazenly.
So a murder in cold blood in Minneapolis is portrayed as a response to a terrorist, a domestic terrorist. Nothing could be a greater lie and an insult to our intelligence because we can watch on our own. So this is war. It’s real war. Unfortunately, it’s also infowar, and it is, of course, chilling and depressing. But we have to carry on to speak absolutely clearly about what’s happening.
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Can you draw a line from the murders of people on speedboats and fishing boats in the Caribbean to the murders by federal agents in the streets of Minneapolis?
JEFFREY SACHS: Of course the White House is ordering murders. The White House is putting people in situations, innocent people, where they are killed, and then it describes them. If it’s fishermen in the waters of Venezuela, it calls them narcotics traffickers. Or if it’s an American citizen peacefully standing on the streets of Minneapolis, it calls him a terrorist.
So it’s a direct link. It is an approach that the Deputy Chief of Staff, Stephen Miller, has explained that there are no laws, there’s only power. We’ve been there before in world history. It is tragic and devastating to go that way, to believe that you are outside of any rules. No morality other than what is in your head, no commitment to the truth in any way.
It’s the opposite of everything we’re taught. And the reason we’re taught that morals matter is that to live lawlessly like this is to create a war of all against all in which innocents die in large numbers. That is what the Deputy Chief of Staff, Stephen Miller, of this president has explained to the American people, that the rest is just niceties.
Miller is an architect both of the international regime of war by the United States and of the domestic war by our federal government on American citizens right now.
The Failure of Constitutional Checks and Balances
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: I hope that the other two branches will do something about this. The court should restrain it, or the Congress should defund it, or the Congress will be deemed complicit in this. It’s rather obvious what’s going on. The lying is shameless because the lying is defied by what we see with our eyes.
JEFFREY SACHS: Congress has just declared itself dead. During the past year, it has not exercised any single function that the Constitution gives it. It is Congress that has the power of tariffs. It is Congress that has the power to declare war. It is Congress that is supposed to determine the budget. These are all clearly spelled out in the Constitution. Congress has abandoned all of this.
Congress has abandoned its oversight responsibilities and its investigative responsibilities. It is something unimaginable that all Congress does is take party line votes. These people work for the President of the United States or for the Republican Party. They work for the American people. That’s true. Whoever they represent, whichever district, whichever state they represent, the Constitution of the United States.
As for the Constitution, the ultimate guarantor of that is supposed to be the U.S. Supreme Court. My classmate, John Roberts, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, holds the future of our republic in his hands right now. Is the Supreme Court just going to allow this complete lawlessness and extra-constitutionality and rule by executive decree, or is it going to say we have a Constitution and it is the job of the Supreme Court to enforce the Constitution by declaring what is the Constitution and what are the prerogatives and not prerogatives of the President of the United States?
The President is dangerous and whimsical in how he behaves and deceitful and completely outside of constitutional rule, declaring emergency here and emergency there and tariff on this and threatening this on that and ordering murders of fishermen here and ordering ICE onto the streets of American cities, all without regard for the law.
Treasury Secretary Bessent’s Admission of Economic Warfare
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: I want to switch gears to one of your other fields of expertise, which is economics.
And I want you to, before I even ask you a question,
here is Treasury Secretary Bessent shamelessly boasting about causing economic chaos in Iran. Watch this.
VIDEO CLIP BEGINS:
MARIA BARTIROMO: What do you want to say about sanctions? Something else you’ve been working on, of course. What are you planning there in terms of Iran and the impact there? Do sanctions actually work? And the same question with regard to 500% secondary sanctions or tariffs on countries who purchase energy products from Russia.
SCOTT BESSENT: Okay, so two things there. There are Treasury sanctions. And if you look at a speech that I gave at the Economic Club of New York last March, I said that I believe the Iranian currency was on the verge of collapse, that if I were an Iranian citizen, I would take my money out.
President Trump ordered Treasury and our OFAC division, Office of Foreign Asset Control, to put maximum pressure on Iran. And it’s worked because in December their economy collapsed. We saw a major bank go under. The central bank has started to print money. There is a dollar shortage. They are not able to get imports. And this is why the people took to the street. So this is economic statecraft, no shots fired. And things are moving in a very positive way here.
VIDEO CLIP ENDS:
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: This comment with my friend and former colleague Maria Bartiromo at Davos came out a day after an article you published in which you revealed what the American Treasury Department was doing to the economy in Venezuela and to the economy in Iran. And here he is shamelessly and as you say, unambiguously admitting the misery that he caused.
Deconstructing Economic Statecraft as Warfare
JEFFREY SACHS: This is really important. It’s very important for people to understand what they’ve just seen. I want, I really appeal to New York Times reporters who write incorrectly or dishonestly every single day, to Washington Post reporters, to Wall Street Journal reporters, to MSNBC, to others reporting to look at what Mr. Bessent explained.
The United States used economic warfare to create chaos in Iran. He explained it clearly. It started with a speech where he said, “I think the Iranian currency will fall.” That is the first step of trying to get people to flee from the currency, to create a self-fulfilling collapse or panic.
Then he explained that the Treasury and its Office of OFAC, which enforces these sanctions, put sanctions on institutions around the world to stop doing any kind of business with Iran. Absolutely normal, legal business. The idea was that Iran would not be able to export its products, not be able to engage in international trade. This is warfare.
Secretary Bessent said that this worked. It worked brilliantly. He said by the end of the year, banks had collapsed, the currency had collapsed, and therefore people came out onto the streets.
Not one of our mainstream media accurately reported any of this. They all reported the official propaganda of the U.S. Government that people came out on the streets to protest the mismanagement of the Iranian regime. This is simply a game, of course. It’s a game where you need to know something.
And our reporters are generally either ignorant because they’re not paying attention, they don’t do homework, or they’re guided by their editors who are in cahoots with the CIA, with the Treasury Department, with the White House, because that’s how they get their stories and their sources.
And so the most basic fact of what happened in Iran in recent weeks was that the United States used economic warfare to destroy the Iranian economy. And it continues to do so. And Mr. Bessent said it’s all going in a positive direction. Then he had that fleeting little smirk on his face.
The goal is regime change. The goal is that the New York Times will dutifully report that the people rose up against their terrible government without mentioning anything about the economic warfare by the United States. Absolutely illegal, absolutely disastrous, crushing the lives, the livelihoods, the health, leading to deaths in mass numbers.
We know from these sanctions that have been used by the United States in this way in many countries to destroy other countries. Venezuela is another case of this.
What was interesting about the Bessent interview is that he said it all very clearly and out loud. I’ve never heard that said that way. Of course I knew about this. That’s why I wrote about it the day before. But to hear it and to hear him chortle, how after this mass unrest and this chaos, that it’s all, quote, “moving in the right direction” should tell the American people and the Congress, for God’s sake, surely there are still some congressmen and senators that care about our country, should explain what is happening.
And this is happening not only in Iran. The U.S. is engaged in economic warfare out of control, completely irresponsible, often gamed by wealthy campaign contributors or Trump’s own family. You front-run the markets or you buy resources or resources are dumped. They’re playing games.
And Bessent at least explained the games with that smirk of his. And it’s absolutely shocking what’s going on. But again, in our country with the mainstream media, absolutely pathetic, as dead as Congress.
I tried. I wrote to reporters of the New York Times. Of course I didn’t hear back from them. The ones covering Iran couldn’t bring themselves to mention what Bessent said directly. They just play along.
Bessent’s Background in Currency Manipulation
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Has Scott Bessent done this before in his private life before he was, pardon me, Secretary of the Treasury?
JEFFREY SACHS: That’s why he is there. He’s not an expert on fiscal policy or the well-being of the American people. He knows nothing about that. He knows nothing about the budget, about macroeconomic policy.
But he has a track record of having brought down a major currency when he worked for George Soros in 1992. Because Bessent was part of the key team in London that shorted the British pound and brought down the pound in 1992. And he spent much of the next twenty years working for Soros.
He’s a hedge fund operator that can understand how to put on a squeeze financially. He is not what one would consider an economic policymaker other than what he called statecraft. I’ve never heard the term applied this way. He meant warfare. But he said this is economic statecraft, not a shot fired. Very proud of himself.
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: So what happens when one country, I’m going to use Keynes’ verb in a famous phrase that he articulated, which you quoted from time to time, debauches the currency of another country?
The Deliberate Collapse of Currency as Warfare
JEFFREY SACHS: What Keynes, the great British political economist of the 20th century, probably the greatest political economist of the last century, wrote in 1919 was that to debauch the currency, meaning to cause a currency collapse, destroys the existing basis of society. When the currency collapses, the order in society falls apart. People are desperate.
And he said that a collapse of the currency aligns all of the forces of the economy on the side of destruction, but does so in a way that not one person in a million can understand. That’s what he wrote in 1919 in Economic Consequences of the Peace.
And what’s happening in Iran is the deliberate collapse of the currency, the deliberate creation of mass poverty, unemployment and unrest in Iran for the purpose of attempting a regime change. And maybe it’s true that not one in a million New York Times reporters can understand it, or mainstream media reporters, but now at least they have Mr. Bessent to listen to. And maybe they should reflect on that to try to understand their job better of reporting what’s really happening.
The United States is engaged in war. War is illegal under our Constitution unless declared by the US Congress. And it’s illegal under international law, the UN Charter, Article 2, Section 4, which is treaty law of the United States since the UN charter was ratified in July 1945.
And all of that is Mr. Stephen Miller should understand. Maybe he does. But the fact of the matter is he’s trying to run an illegal operation, encouraging his boss to do so. Whereas we, the American people, want a constitutional republic, not one person rule.
The Global Shift Away from the Dollar
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Are these sanctions in these whimsical on again, off again, as much as 500%, as low as 10% punitive tariffs accelerating other countries, BRICS comes to mind, away from the American dollar as the means of exchange?
JEFFREY SACHS: Of course, the US has grossly abused what was once called its exorbitant privilege of having other economies use the US dollar as a means of payment. Because when other economies do that, it means that the US can borrow more easily. The US Government has high liquidity.
But it turned out that the US Government realized absolutely disastrously, in my view, that it could use that privilege to fight wars through economic means with other countries, what Bessent called statecraft. It’s not statecraft, it’s warfare.
And what is happening is that the rest of the world is coming to understand that the United States is thuggish, unreliable, untrustworthy and dangerous. It doesn’t mean that the US doesn’t continue to have its blackmail and its threats and its power. After all, the United States has military bases in about 80 countries in the world.
I would say just about every one of them feels in part physically occupied by the US, physically vulnerable to coups or unrest of the kind that Bessent talked about, feels threatened. Countries that host US military bases are not made more secure by that. They are made less secure. They become vassal states of the United States.
That’s the case all through the Middle East right now. That’s why so many Arab countries, I’m sorry to say, bow down to the United States. They’re occupied by US military bases.
But the point is that step by step, the rest of the world is saying, we don’t want this. And what is happening is that other countries are getting together to say, we want normal life, not life under the threat of Emperor Donald.
And so even the Prime Minister of Canada, next door to the United States, Prime Minister Mark Carney, went to China a couple of weeks ago and entered into a strategic partnership with China on trade, technology, and other areas. The first day, Trump said, well, good for him. Now Trump is threatening punitive measures, tariff rates to the heavens and so forth against Canada.
It won’t work because Canada’s not alone. Even the UK, which is the most subservient of any country in the world to the United States since World War II, the most. Even the Prime Minister of UK Keir Starmer, said, I’m going to China, and the United States can’t stop me because the United States will not determine whether we have normal trade with China.
The fact of the matter is that the vast majority of the world does not want war, does not want sides, does not want US “economic statecraft,” which means economic warfare. The rest of the world wants to get on with their lives, and they’re doing it step by step.
Yesterday or today, I can’t even remember by the hour, now Trump has threatened new tariffs against South Korea, a supposed ally home to US military bases. Well, the South Korean leadership was recently in Beijing saying, we want normal relations with China.
And interestingly, though the US punished one country after another last year, trade among those countries outside of the United States didn’t suffer. It turned out you can get along just fine with trading with each other. The United States is not big enough, powerful enough, determinative enough of the world’s future to hold it in its hands the way that our Emperor Donald thinks it is.
And so the rest of the world had increases of trade. China’s trade went up last year. So this is what is happening. Countries are finding other ways to do business with each other, and they are not being cowed by the US, even though I have to say, the US can still do a great deal of harm, as is the case in Venezuela, as is the case in Iran.
And we may see within the coming days a US attack, military attack on Iran as these aircraft carrier task force approach the Persian Gulf. So we may be on the verge of a major war, maybe not, maybe it’s a bluff, but the warfare is absolutely real.
TikTok and the Suppression of Free Speech
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Before we go, I want to switch one last subject matter. Free speech. We’re going to play a clip for you of an interview with the new president of TikTok. Bear in mind these are the same people that own CBS and are now trying to get their hands on CNN. Watch what they have done with the word Zionist.
VIDEO CLIP BEGINS:
ADAM PRESSER: We made a change to designate the use of the term Zionist as a proxy for a protected attribute as hate speech. So if somebody were to use Zionist, of course you can use it in the sense of you’re a proud Zionist. But if you’re using it in the context of degrading somebody, calling somebody a Zionist as a dirty name, then that gets designated as hate speech to be moderated against.
Over the course of 2024, we tripled the amount of accounts that we were banning for hateful activity. We also have, I think, over two dozen Jewish organizations that are constantly feeding us intelligence and information when they spot violative trends.
There is no finish line. There’s no finish line to moderating hate speech, identifying hateful trends, trying to keep the platform safe. There’s no such thing as an end game.
VIDEO CLIP ENDS:
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: How dangerous is this?
JEFFREY SACHS: Well, this was the whole purpose of the takeover of TikTok. What happened with TikTok is that it showed the honesty of Israel’s genocide in Gaza. All over the world, people saw a genocide before their own eyes. They saw the celebration by Israeli Defense forces as they killed people in cold blood, as they blew up buildings, as they destroyed universities, as they blew up hospitals.
And so the decision was taken by the Zionist lobby in the United States, the pro-Israel lobby, that TikTok had to come down. It had to be owned by, it turned out, Mr. Ellison, one of the richest people in the world, who is an ardent pro-Zionist. I think according to Adam Presser, that term can be used.
And the idea was that exactly what this new CEO is doing would happen, which is the TikTok would be policed so that it could not carry the truth about Israel’s war crimes.
The most basic point of all is that Zionism is a political ideology associated with the state of Israel. It is not a religious ideology. It is not Judaism, as the scholars have been pointing out in great depth and sophistication. A lot of traditional Jewish thought was strongly anti-Zionist.
The idea that attacking Zionism as an ideology is anti-Semitic is as false as can be. But that’s a game that is being played by the Zionist lobby in the United States. That lobby has a lot of power, as everybody knows, and it took over TikTok with the help of the government precisely to do what we just saw Mr. Presser explain.
In other words, this wasn’t a happenstance. This has been the plan of the last couple of years to transfer the control and ownership of TikTok USA into the hands of the Zionist lobby, if I could put it that way.
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Professor Sachs, thank you very much. It’s nice to see you at home, probably for a short period of time, but Godspeed for your next traveling. Thank you for your time, Jeff. All the best. We look forward to seeing you next week.
JEFFREY SACHS: Great to be with you. Thank you.
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Thank you. Coming up at 11 o’clock this morning on all of this, Aaron Maté. At 2 this afternoon, Matthew Hoh. At 3 this afternoon, Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski. Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom.
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