Transcript of ‘Judging Freedom’ edition of 6 August

Napolitano: 0:32
Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Wednesday, August 6th, 2025. Professor Gilbert Doctor will be here with us in just a moment on, Is Moscow Optimistic? But first this. [commercial message]

1:58
Professor Doctorow, good day to you, my friend. Welcome here. Thank you for accommodating my schedule. It’s always a pleasure to chat with you on these Wednesdays. In the past couple of weeks, the United States has delivered nuclear- armed weaponry to Great Britain and other allies. And last Friday, President Trump famously issued a statement on his own social media in response to some taunting that went back and forth between him and former Russian President Medvedev to the effect that President Trump had ordered American nuclear-powered and -capable submarines to an appropriate place, meaning somewhere closer to Russia. Are you able to get your thumb on the pulse of the Kremlin? Are you able to assess how the Kremlin feels from and after these events?

Gilbert Doctorow, PhD: 3:02
Well, I’m going to do that indirectly, of course. I don’t have a microphone under President Putin’s pillow. So what we have to do is use the entourage, those who speak for official Russia. And one of these programs, which I follow closely, is “60 Minutes”.

That has two co-hosts. One is Mr. Popov, who is a Duma member today, and his wife, Olga Skabieva. And I believe it was Monday they had a program which encouraged me to believe that the Kremlin is very confident, that they are not alarmed, they are not looking to escalate the conflict with the United States and with NATO over these various peculiar things that the United States has done in the last week or so. By peculiar, of course, you mentioned the outstanding case of the dispatch of these two nuclear-carrying, nuclear-arms-carrying submarines closer to Russia.

4:04
And the other thing which has been in the news as well, General Donahue’s statements about capturing Kaliningrad in lightning speed, Donahue being the senior US military officer in Europe. These could be alarming, but they’re not alarming to Moscow.

And why is that so? First, because they understand very well the context in which Mr. Trump works. They understand that he has in his own party a certain Lindsey Graham, who is a rabid nationalist and rabidly anti-Russian and who makes all kinds of weird proposals that Mr. Trump cannot ignore. And so to keep Graham happy and quiet, he pretends to do things which are, shall we say, bizarre, shall we say chest thumping, like these two that I mentioned. From the standpoint of the Russians, the idea of the dispatch of these nuclear submarines was meaningless. As they say, as they said on this program, panelists who know military affairs, the range of the missiles on board those American submarines is 15,000 kilometers.

In other words, even if they stayed at their home ports on the west coast and the east coast of the United States, they could hit any target they would want in Russia anyway. So the idea of moving them so-called “closer to Russia” doesn’t change the threat of these weapons from what they were before they were moved one inch.

The other point, it’s something like Donahue, it’s well known what the Russian response will be to any attempt to capture Kaliningrad, however many kilometers wide it is and how many assets the United States and NATO have all around Kaliningrad, So they take it. Let’s say they take it.

The next day, the United States will cease to exist. That is clear. The Russians said any threat to their territory will bring a nuclear response. So they don’t take seriously what Donahue is saying.

Napolitano:
I want to follow up on that in just a minute, but first a little breaking news. “Russia Today” reports President Putin’s meeting with US President’s, I’m quoting, special envoy Steve Witkoff just wrapped up. It lasted nearly three hours. Can you extrapolate at all from the duration, well, the fact of the meeting and the duration of the meeting, what was likely discussed?

Doctorow: 6:46
The length of the meeting confirms what the panelists were saying on the “60 Minutes” program, that they had a lot to discuss, and Ukraine directly is a lesser part of it, shall we say.

One thing that was noted by the panelists, which is underlined by Mr. Witkoff’s arrangements on his visit to Moscow: he came in yesterday, and he was taken around by Kirill Demitriev, who is the head of the Russian Direct Investment Corporation. So he is a man with great business experience in the United States, and he is a partner for Mr. Witkoff to talk business. And what could they talk about?

Well, this panel were speculating they would talk about rare earth. The United States is in its final negotiations with China, over tariffs. And the biggest threat that China has, which mitigates all of the alarming plans of Mr. Trump to impose tariffs and other restrictions on China, is that their near-monopoly on global supplies of rare earth metals, which are essential for military production and most modern electronics. Now the Russians have it also. And so it’s not, it’s quite possible that Dmitriyev and Witkoff were discussing precisely these rare-earth metals, which the United States would like to know the position of Russia, before they go into final talks with China. That’s one of them.

Napolitano:
We are watching, forgive my interruption, we’re watching, live, Mr. Witkoff’s entourage leaving the Kremlin.

All right, back to where we were before we learned about this meeting and thank you for your thoughts on it. What would the reaction in the Kremlin be, or what has been the reaction in the Kremlin, to the delivery, the rather quiet delivery of nuclear weapons to Great Britain and other allies? I don’t know where they were delivered. The Guardian keeps reporting six of them. Can you enlighten us on this?

Doctorow:
Well, this is posturing, just like moving those submarines was posturing. It doesn’t change anything. The United States has complete control over the use of those weapons. So whether they are nominally sitting on British soil or German soil or whatever, it’s the United States that will give instructions to use them or not to use them.

In that sense, the responsibility remains with the United States in its direct relationship with Russia. And the European allies, whoever are hosting these weapons, are just bit players, the same way that Lukashenko in Belarus is a bit player when we speak about the nuclear armed Oreshniks being dispatched to Belarus. That’s fine. But without the say-so from Putin, Lukashenko could do nothing with those weapons. So these are theatrics. They are show. They are posturing. They don’t change the reality.

10:06
The reality is that Ukraine is badly losing the war, and that this drama that Trump and company are creating on the world stage is to cover up that fact and to pretend that they are in control of events, when they absolutely are not in control of events. The Russians are.

Napolitano: 10:25
How, I mean, the reports out of Ukraine are indicative of the end of empire, conscripting males over the age of 60, sending young men from bars and dance halls directly to the front line with literally no training whatsoever, barely time to put a uniform on and a weapon in their hands. How confident is the Kremlin that this will be over soon when the Ukrainian military collapses? Or will these drones, these Ukrainian drones, keep the special military operation going on and on and on?

Doctorow:
Well, the drones, of course, are a factor. They can be produced and they can be supplied from Britain and other countries to keep the war going on and on and on.

But the reality is that there is politics in Ukraine. It’s not a dead country. And at a certain point, there was political opposition to the war and to the suffering will take hold. I have mentioned in our last discussion the speculation that the United States is looking to evict Mr. Zelensky from office and to replace him possibly with Umerov, who is the head of the negotiating team.

11:48
Other people have spoken about his replacement, as illusioning. But today I was reading in Russian news that there are Ukrainian parliament members, they call their parliament, they call it the Rada, who are considered to be real potential replacements for Zelensky. And one of them is a certain 35-year-old parliamentarian who was formerly in his party, the Servants of the People, before she was evicted for opposing various policy elements. This is an Anaskar Hord, who’s made as her main point to the public to gain support precisely to stop the strong-arm recruitment from the streets and from the bars and what else, that the Ukrainian government is now practicing, who says to the press that there are 400,000 deserters from the Russian army, from the Ukrainian army, that is, and that she supports desertion because these poor soldiers have had no rotation, have had no chance to return to their families, and are being maintained in the state of suspense [before their death].

Napolitano:
Oh my God, Is that dangerous, publicly to support desertion? Is that a potential crime under Ukrainian law? I mean, I can understand the deserters, but for a government official to say, “I support the desertion”?

Doctorow: 13:14
Leave the law out of it. They also mention in the same article that she happens to have US support and that she has support from an unnamed businessman who is a close friend of Trump.

Napolitano:
Gee, I wonder who that is. Did we just watch him leaving the Kremlin in a Mercedes? I want to play for you– it’s a little long, it’s a minute and a half, but it will give you much to comment on– a series of questions to President Trump yesterday in which he repeats three times “Ukraine is Biden’s war”. Nobody believes that here in the West any more, but I’d like your thoughts on it.

He also addresses the conscripts. He said he never heard of the 60-year-old men, but It’s Trump rambling on and on and on, but there’s a basis in here for you and I to talk about it. Chris, cut number four.

Questioner: 14:08
President Zelensky just signed a law allowing for citizens age 60 and above to serve in the military. We’ve seen dozens of videos of young men being hauled into vans and dragged to the front lines against their will.

And we’ve even seen videos of a young man with Down’s syndrome serving on the front line. You, when you campaigned, you said you wanted to see the people stop dying. A lot of people admired that statement. Now the people dying are elderly, mentally handicapped, and conscripts. So even if a ceasefire doesn’t work out, why should Americans continue to fund a foreign military that’s scraping the bottom of the barrel of its population like this?

Trump: 14:44
Well, you have to understand very importantly, this is Biden’s war. This is not my war. I’m here to get us out of it. It’s a mess. And I’m here to get us out.

I haven’t heard that when you say about 60 year old men and, you know, et cetera. But this is Biden’s war. And we’re working very hard to get us out. I stopped five wars in the last five months, actually. And I’d like this to be the sixth, frankly.

And that doesn’t even include Iran obliterating their nuclear haul, because they would have had nuclear weapons within two months. But stopped a lot of wars. You just take a look at the ones just over the last two or three months. It’s been amazing. This is the one I’m trying to stop.

This is the one we’re working hardest on. The other ones I stopped with in a matter of days, almost every one of them, including India and Pakistan. And I could go over the whole list, but you know the list as well as I do. But this is the one we’d like to see. I have not heard that, but this is Biden’s war.

And it’s a war that he got us into or indirectly got us into. It should have never happened. It would have never happened had I been president. Yeah, next.

Napolitano: 15:49
Who can take that seriously? What does the Kremlin think when they hear this rambling and disingenuous efforts to blame everything on Joe Biden?

Doctorow:
They agree with it. They are saying that this is Biden’s war. And let me turn things around and look beyond the obvious. Mr. Trump is trying to end the war, but not in the way that most people think. The more extravagant his intentions to impose sanctions on Russia, the faster the Russians are accelerating their destruction of Ukraine. Do you see my point?

Napolitano:
I do see your point.

Doctorow:
It is moving faster and faster. When they say that they are going to penalize in a way as yet not usd, penalize the shadow fleet carrying Russian oil around the world, well you can bet that that has taken the length of this war down by several months, because the Russians are not going to sit around on their hands waiting to lose their exports because of these crazy new restrictions that we put on their fleet. The fleet will in any case go out. It will be defended by Russian warships who will frighten away everybody from doing anything to those ships. But it will be a nerve-racking period.

17:14
And I think for this reason, the moves to reach the Dnieper are going faster and faster. The territory captured each week is greater in square kilometers than it was at any former point in this war. And the likelihood of capture of all of the Donetsk, meaning the eastern part of Ukraine from east of the Dnieper River, is entirely doable within the next month or two, not the next year or two. For that we can thank Mr. Trump. He is really helping to end this war.

Napolitano:
Very, very interesting observation, which I will surely run past Scott Ritter and the others with whom I’ll be speaking later today. Before we go, I want to switch to Gaza. I don’t usually ask you about Gaza, but do you, does the Kremlin see the line between the slaughter and the starvation and the genocide in Gaza and another attack on Iran? Does the Kremlin care about what’s happening in Gaza? Because surely they care about whether or not Trump bombs Iran again. And apparently Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu has begun to beat those drums with Trump’s inner circle.

Doctorow: 18:38
Well, Putin has been speaking to Netanyahu two weeks consecutively by phone. I think the Russians are very interested in ending this Gaza nightmare as soon as possible, without military intervention on their part. Of course they could do it, but it would complicate the situation in the Middle East vastly, and so they’re holding back. The connection between the Gaza genocide and a possible attack on Iran: well, I don’t believe there will be any attack on Iran, simply because Iran is capable of annihilating Israel in a day or two if they want to use those several thousand ballistic missiles that are safely stored underground and which the Israelis were unable to damage.

19:29
Therefore, there’s a lot of talk about attacking Iran. The Israelis by themselves, unless they use nuclear weapons, will achieve nothing. And if they do use a nuclear weapon, they probably will have a nuclear weapon coming back at them, because there is a lot of talk that Iran actually has the bomb.

Napolitano:
Well, Ted Postel, Professor Postel, who’s arguably the foremost physicist in the United States, emeritus at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has articulated to friends of yours and mine that not only did the United States not set back the Iran nuclear program, but they effectively have a nuclear weapon as we speak and had it before the Americans attacked. Does the Kremlin recognize that? Does the Kremlin agree with Professor Postel?

Doctorow: 20:27
I imagine they do, and it is another example of the perverse effects of what looks like America’s saber rattling and chest beating. The achievements are precisely opposite of what they’re supposed to be.

Napolitano:
Right. Professor Doctorow, thank you very much. A fascinating, fascinating conversation. I can’t wait to run past Scott Ritter this afternoon because sometimes you guys agree and sometimes you disagree on your theory about secondary tariffs accelerating the special military operation. It’s a brilliant observation on your part, and I’m grateful for your having articulated it here on our show. Thank you, Professor. We look forward to seeing you next week.

Doctorow:
Goodbye.

Napolitano:
Of course. All the best. And the aforementioned Scott Ritter will be here today at 1 o’clock, followed by Max Blumenthal at 2, followed by Phil Giraldi at 3. A great afternoon lineup for you.

21:28
Thank you for watching. Judge Napolitano for “Judging Freedom”.