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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jl2vwsQ1_k

Napolitano: 0:32
Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for “Judging Freedom”. Today is Wednesday, June 18th, 2025. Professor Gilbert Doctorow will be with us in just a moment. And here’s the question for him: What does the Kremlin think of Donald Trump after the events of the past week? But first this.

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02:21
Professor Doctorow, good day to you. And welcome here, my friend. Does, how does the Kremlin view President Trump’s speech in Saudi Arabia last month, in light of recent developments between Israel and Iran? Do you think that this was a grand, do you think the Kremlin thinks the speech was a grand deception orchestrated by [Trump?], or a momentary lapse by Trump, or he keeps changing his mind? Or are we putting too much emphasis on what Trump thinks?

Gilbert Doctorow, PhD: 2:58
I think we’re putting too much emphasis on what Trump says. The Kremlin, I think, has its own inertia, its own course, and that can be modified if they believe that Mr. Trump is genuine, which I think they do, and it can be modified the other way, if they think that he is losing the battle domestically and internationally to control policy, which I think also is true.

So the Kremlin, will be happy for any benefits to come out of the favorable predisposition of Mr. Trump, but they’re not counting on it, and they’re going their own way.

Napolitano: 3:43
Well, what does the Kremlin think of Trump? Do they believe what he says? When President Putin speaks to President Trump on the phone and they get off the phone, what do they do? Say, “my God, he’s crazy? Who the hell knows whether or not to believe him?” Or do they take copious notes and analyze his every word?

Doctorow:
The one thing they don’t think is that he’s crazy. They have thought the American leadership was crazy, insane in the medical sense of the word under Biden. And that made them extremely cautious in proceeding with the conduct of war, because they didn’t know what could trigger a totally irrational and deadly response from the United States. In the case of Mr. Trump, that question does not exist.

They believe he is rational. They believe he is a dealmaker as he– would-be dealmaker, as he says of himself. But they also are perfectly cognizant of all of the difficulties that he has in steering policy, given the heavy hand of the opposition, which is Lindsey Graham allied with the Europeans headed by Mr. Macron. So knowing about all this, they have to be very cautious with Trump, but not because they doubt his commitment or have some doubts about his rationality.

Napolitano: 5:17
I want to play a clip for you. Chris, I’m pretty sure we have this– I don’t know the number; bear with me a minute– of President Trump on Air Force One on Sunday night, where he was asked about Tulsi Gabbard. Okay, we have it.

She of course, and we’ll run this clip as well– Chris has interspersed one inside the other– told a congressional committee under oath that the IC, as she calls it, the intelligence community uniformly agree that Iran is not developing and is not close to a nuclear weapon and hasn’t been since 2003. And then a reporter asked him what he thought about this. I’d like your views on this. Chris?
—————-

Reporter:
People always said that you don’t believe Iran should be able to have a nuclear weapon. But how close do you personally think that they were to getting one? Because Tulsi Gabbard testified in March that the intelligence community said Iran wasn’t building a nuclear weapon.

Gabbard:
The IC continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon.

Trump:
I don’t care what she said. I think they were very close to having it.
—————-

Napolitano: 6:34
Under federal law, she is the principal and sole briefer of the President of the United States on intelligence matters. And he says publicly, knowing it’s going to be aired internationally, “I don’t care what she says.” How does the Kremlin view that?

Doctorow: 6:56
It might be scandalized. I don’t think the Kremlin would say, but I’m about to say now, that she should resign.

Napolitano:
I absolutely agree with you.. Scott Rittera said it. Our colleagues on this show have said it. If he says, “I don’t care what she says”, and she comes in with a briefing book three inches thick, he’s only interested in the top two pages, she should resign if he doesn’t trust her. What is his source of information if it’s superior to hers? She has supposedly the best intel sources in the world, the Five Eyes and their collaboration with Mossad. She comes to a conclusion and he says, “I don’t care”?!

Doctorow: 7:36
Judge, I wouldn’t read too much into this. I wouldn’t look for the source of his latest statement. I wouldn’t necessarily say, “Oh yes, Netanyahu or Netanyahu’s minions whispered this in his ear.” I don’t think that’s what’s going on.

I just– it’s inconvenient for him to hear this when he sees the opportunity to strike gold by joining Israel in a victorious attack on Iran. My colleagues have said various things about Trump’s personality, that he’s weak or that he’s stupid or he has no strategy. I don’t agree with these remarks, not because I think that he is a saint or a genius, nothing of the sort. I think he has another problem. And the problem is opportunism.

8:24
Now that may sound– opportunism taken by itself in general cultural or intellectual discussion is considered a negative. I’ve had experience with opportunism, people who’ve hired me and who made my career possible only because they were opportunists. And so I am personally predisposed towards opportunists. Opportunists generally are not corporate people. They are people like Donald Trump, who is an entrepreneur.

Entrepreneurs have their own belly feel for people who come in and make all kinds of crazy or brilliant proposals for investments and so forth. And they use their nose for opportunity to back or to decline these proposals. Trump is that kind of a person. So by itself, his leaning to opportunism is not necessarily a big discredit to him, but in the given case, it certainly is. The question is, is he right?

9:30
I mean, he could be right. As I’ve written today, judging by what the talk shows in Moscow were saying last night, the Kremlin thinks that Iran will get bashed, bashed if the Americans join the fight. And that is obviously the reading of the situation that Donald Trump has. And he would like to cash in by being on the winning side, not only because that is good by itself, but it’s important in keeping onside and behind him all the political forces on Capitol Hill.

Napolitano: 10:07
Is the Kremlin, can the Kremlin do anything to resist or temper the effect of that bashing?

Doctorow:
It is again, reading the, listening to the remarks of the expert panelists on Vladimir Solovyov’s show, they are not the Kremlin, they are not Mr. Putin speaking, but they give you a sense of what insiders are thinking. They believe that Russia will not intervene and they believe, sad to say, because this runs counter to what I and many of my colleagues thought, they do not believe that China will intervene. They are placing their bets on Pakistan intervening, which to my knowledge, nobody much is talking about. Apparently Islamabad has come out saying that it will blast Israel to bits with its nuclear missiles if this proceeds.

11:09
And that is believable. So I think the Kremlin is hoping maybe they have backtrack, they have back channels to Islamabad to know what’s going on. I think that would be a safe guess

Napolitano:
What is the Kremlin’s view of Benjamin Netanyahu? Do they think he’s a madman?

Doctorow:
I imagine so. I’m not sure that there are professional psychologists who are advising Mr. Putin on what he should say or do. But they do not believe he’s rational, that’s correct.

Napolitano:
Do they believe that Mossad– or they, the officials around President Putin in the Kremlin– was responsible in any way for the drone attacks on four Russian air bases and two or three Russian civilian targets a few weeks ago?

Doctorow:
Well, when I heard this, it must have been a week ago or so, expressed as a possibility by Alistair Crook, I thought, no, this cannot be. It seemed improbable to me. But now I have to take back my words. Again, on last night’s program, experts in Middle Eastern affairs were saying that it looks like the hands of Mossad were all over the Ukrainian attack on those bases. And the logic for this is what happened, the way that the attack by Israel was carried out. Part of it was drone attacks on the air defenses, knocking them out.

And those attacks were by drones prepositioned near these defense installations, very similar to the way the attack was carried out on the Russian air bases. So it would not have been possible to make this conclusion until the Israelis carried it out. And I said another thing. We go back to the same time period. It was said on the show that these drones were pre-positioned or the whole program was put into effect at virtually the same time as Spiderweb in Ukraine, that is to say 18 months ago. This was not done last week.

Therefore, the involvement– and why would Mossad get into it? Well, here’s where I disagree with Alastair. He was saying, “Oh, but the Russians always have been villains for the Jewish people going back to Tsarist times.”

13:47
That’s a very nice generalization. I won’t take it, I won’t begin to dispute it, though I think I can. The issue is not that. The issue is: the Russians were playing footsie with Iran over a comprehensive cooperation agreement which at various times in his discussion appeared to have– this goes back more than a year– appeared to have a defense alliance within it. What they actually signed does not have any alliance or common defense in it. Nonetheless, it could have touched off alarm bells in Israel that the Russians and Tehran were an alliance. And therefore they decided they are strategic enemy and they would act on its strategic assets. That is all credible.

Napolitano: 14:39
I’m going to jump in on this a little deeper in a minute, but first I want everyone to know that we’re running a chat room poll. So all of the thousands of people that chat, that text us during your show are being asked to vote on the following. Can President Trump be trusted to negotiate in good faith? Yes, no, undecided. We’ll have those results before we finish.

Is Netanyahu out of his mind that he would dispatch the Mossad against Russia?

Doctorow: 15:14
He is a desperate man, and there you have it. He’s a cornered rat. And cornered rats do things which are rational for the rat but are quite irrational for everyone depending on the rat. That’s to say the whole Israeli people are held hostage by this cornered rat who happens to have the name Netanyahu.

Napolitano:
Is there any military or political significance– and maybe this hasn’t happened; I thought it did– to the transfer of the name, the nomenclature of the conflagration in Ukraine from “special military operation” to “war on terror” or “war against terrorists”? Can you explain that to us, please?

Doctorow: 16:08
Well, a lot has been made of that in the last 10 days or so, with the reason that obviously a change such as that would mean that Mr. Putin is assuming far greater powers of control over the military, where it is acting and indeed who is acting, than he enjoys presently under the Duma-approved edict giving him a special military operation. As you know, he cannot move Russian conscripts out of the borders of the Russian Federation under the powers he enjoys now. This is one example, one small example of the ability he would enjoy to have virtual free hand in conducting the war in and against Ukraine if it were changed in designation from a special military operation, which is very circumscribed activity, to a war on terror, which has an international, is an international concept widely shared. When you’re speaking about acting against a terrorist state, all bets are off. You can do whatever you want, you can assassinate anybody you want, and so forth.

17:25
The problem with this change is: I don’t believe it ever took place. It was hinted at. Mr. Putin was suggesting that this is where we could go, but he’s not going there.

Napolitano:
This change, even though to the West it just sounds like nomenclature, obviously it triggers a lot of things legally. I would imagine, and correct me if I’m wrong, this change can only be done by the Duma, the Russian legislature.

Doctorow:
Exactly right. When the special military operation was initiated, it was with the specific voted approval of the lower house of parliament, the state Duma, ratified of course by other authorities. The point is that no such bill has been introduced into the Duma.

Napolitano: 18:13
Is the Duma basically controlled by one political party, which is headed by Vladimir Putin? I mean stated differently, if he wanted this, even though there are some legislative hoops through which he’d have to jump, couldn’t he get it just by asking for it?

Doctorow:
He could get it just by asking for it, but not because there are no opposition parties in the Duma. Their opposition parties are opposition basically on domestic policy. As regards foreign policy, all of the several parties in the Duma are aligned totally with the governing party, United Russia.

Now, having said that, as a matter of fact, the legislation, enacting legislation, which made possible Russia to stand behind the Donbas independence, the declarations of independence, and to treat them as sovereign states and to conclude treaties with them for mutual defense — all of that was initiated by the Communist Party, not by– there were two bills before the state Duma. And-

Napolitano: 19:24
Let me just copy it. There still is a Communist Party in Russia? Forgive my ignorance.

Doctorow:
There is, it’s the Communist Party of the Russian Federation. Mr. Zhuganov is a 20, 25 years leader of it. If it were– but for the historical record and all of the old timers who constitute a large part of the membership and who hold very dearly a memory of the old Communist Party. If it weren’t for that, Mr. Zyganov would do– what he should do, is rename it the Social Democratic Party of Russia, because in all respects, it is like a West European social democratic party. It fights for workers, it fights for unions, it fights for social justice.

Napolitano: 20:11
OK. And where is it on the war with Ukraine? It’s aligned with President Putin.

Doctorow:
It is, but sometimes it’s one or two steps ahead of him. It is more patriotic and more aggressive, I would say, regarding Ukraine than Mr. Putin and his United Russia party.

Napolitano:
You mentioned something earlier, and I don’t want to nitpick on words that under the special military operation, President Putin is unable to send conscripts, people who have been drafted into the military outside the geographic area of the Russian Federation. Is there a Russian manpower shortage in the military as we speak, Professor Doctorow?

Doctorow:
Oh, not at all. They’ve been running 50-60,000 new recruits. Now, these are not drafted people. These are volunteers who are signing up for a service in the area of the Special Military Operation and receive 8,000, 10,000 euros upon signing, maybe more, because I’m speaking now of the federal allotment. But each region where these people are resident has its own additional allotment. So it could be 30,000 euros that you get on signing up. It’s a very big incentive for people who don’t see more than 10,000 euros a year at their jobs. And so they have, this is an incentive, it is not the incentive to sign up, be patriotic, do your service and look after your children and grandchildren.

21:51
The signees are not 20 to 25. When you look at them, they’re more like 40 to 50. And they’re even people who are older, because not every job requires perfect physical fitness. You can send up a drone very nicely when you’re 80. So the point is that he has no problem filling the ranks of the– And additionally, they’ve gotten a bonus in the last week by Mr.
Shoigu’s visits to Pyongyang, where he met with the Supreme Leader Kim. And he agreed on 1,000 North Korean soldiers who are specialists in mine detection and disarmament, and 5,000 construction worker soldiers from North Korea to come to Korsk province and rebuild it. So that also frees up several thousand Russian combatants to do fighting.

Napolitano: 22:53
Understood, understood.

On the poll, can President Trump be trusted to negotiate in good faith? There are about 8,200 people watching us now, 1,600 have voted in the vote. Can President Trump be trusted to negotiate in good faith? No 93% Yes 6%. I guess there’s 1% in there: Not sure. That’s the … tenor over here in the US, if I can put my finger on the pulse. I haven’t seen any official polls. Even the MAGA people are, a lot of them are very dismayed about all this.

One last thing, my longtime friend and former Fox News colleague Tucker Carlson has an interview coming out later today. It was taped either yesterday or the day before, and he sent us a small clip with Senator Ted Cruz, who’s in the Lindsey Graham, Richard Blumenthal, bombed them into the Stone Age camp, meaning Iran, in the Senate.

And Tucker begins by saying, what’s the pop– to Ted Cruz, Senator Cruz, what’s the population of Iran? –
-I don’t know.

How big is it?
–I don’t know. It’s a big country.

What’s their ethnic makeup?
–I don’t know.

You want to kill these people and you don’t even know who they are?

And they go back and forth and back and forth. This is just the beginning. I’m sure there’s a lot more fireworks. Are you surprised if that is typical, a typical level of ignorance of those calling for the destruction of Iran? They don’t even have the faintest idea of the amount of human suffering and death that their calls if enacted on would produce.

Doctorow: 24:43
I can agree with you completely about our opponents. I’ve spoken of the world leaders in the West as being depraved and I don’t take back those words. They are jackals. At the same time, I urge all of our fellow thinkers to look in the mirror, not because we’re depraved, but because we are sometimes a little too liberal, a little too limited in our own perspectives and horizons.

When I studied, when I dealt with Russian dissidents– these are not active dissidents but just people in intellectual circles who are very critical, hypercritical of their government and all of its failures and corruption, and they go on and on– the unique thing about them is that they don’t think about the rest of the world, and they don’t want to hear about the rest of the world. Their concerned only to focus, they are razor-focused on the flaws they see around them, that it’s not a perfect world around them, that it’s quite an ugly world. I say the same thing to us. You have to consider that Mr. Trump is working in a world of depraved fellow leaders.

25:54
When he was at the G7, he was a minority of one with six warmongers. That is the world we live in. And before you make any judgment about Mr. Trump and whether he is trustworthy or not trustworthy, you have to consider where he is operating.

Napollitano:
It’s hard for me to accept the exact use of your phrase, he was with six warmongers. He’s not a man of peace, even though he claims he is. He’s threatening to drop 30,000 pound bombs on Tehran.

Doctorow:
We’ll see if he does that. But there is around him, there is around all of us, a controlling political elite in our country, in every European country except Hungary and Slovakia. The people in control are ugly people, ugly people, not physically, morally ugly people. They are, they all should stand before courts for their warmongering.

Napolitano: 27:09
On that I agree with you fully, but Donald Trump is migrating toward them. He’s funding a genocide in Gaza, he’s funding Joe Biden’s useless war in Ukraine, and now he’s threatening to destroy Tehran. This is a man of peace?

Doctorow:
In the middle of that, you slipped in Ukraine. The reports are that he stopped all supplies and military equipment to Ukraine. So let’s give him a break on something.

Napolitano:
Oh my goodness, if he did that, I would applaud him. It would also be front-page news. This must be, I know you wrote about it, but this must be either unknown to the West or of such recent vintage we haven’t seen it here.

Doctorow:
It is not broadcast on the “Financial Times” or the BBC. They are still hopeful, though they’re wrong, that they can bring him around. And he leaves open that possibility. Why did he sign this ridiculous trade agreement with Keir Starmer, giving them a benefit? To shut Starmer up and to let him also know that it hasn’t been completed, and he can still revise the tariffs on British steel and so forth, to keep him on the hook.

28:21
This man is more tricky than any of his critics in the liberal camp, liberal I mean, our camp, not the neoliberal camp, than we give him credit for. But he is working in a vile environment.

Napolitano:
Your analysis is so astute and so nuanced, Professor Doctorow, and I’m deeply grateful as are the viewers, now that you are sharing it with us. Thank you very much. Continue to send your notes to us. We may have to call on you if something dramatic happens in the Middle East and we need your analysis. Short of that, we’ll look forward to seeing you next week.

Doctorow:
Well, thanks so much.

Napolitano: 29:02
Thank you. Great analysis, very smart, nicely nuanced, very helpful.

Coming up later today, we’re going to call and wake him up, at 11 o’clock this morning, Max Blumenthal, and Max is my dear friend and he loves to be teased. And I’m sure he’s been up since the crack of dawn.

At three o’clock, Phil Giraldi, just back from vacation and filled with vinegar, so to speak. And at four o’clock, I’m not sure where he is, but at four o’clock, Pepe Escobar.

29:35
Judge Napolitano for “Judging Freedom”.