In this Judging Freedom episode, Max Blumenthal alleges a politically driven U.S. campaign against Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua, citing CIA psyops, SouthCom actions, and Marco Rubio’s sway. He warns of possible decapitation strikes on Maduro and disputes claims tying him to the cartel “Tren,” which he says U.S. intel cleared. Blumenthal criticizes NYPD–Israel training links, frames intra-MAGA rifts over Israel as fueling backlash, and discusses Joe Kent’s push to widen the Charlie Kirk murder probe amid FBI resistance. He suggests donor pressure, foreign-influence questions, and Tulsi Gabbard’s marginalization reveal deep-state dynamics and unanswered issues surrounding Kirk’s autopsy, burial, and evidence.
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Judging Freedom Podcast
Streamed live on October 30, 2025
NAPOLITANO: Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Thursday, October 30th, 2025. Max Blumenthal joins us now. Max, a pleasure, my dear friend. Thank you for accommodating my schedule.
If you listen to the senior senator from South Carolina — I mean, I can play this for you, it’ll drive you crazy — he claims that the government of Cuba, the government of Venezuela, the government of Colombia are actually drug dealers and Donald Trump has the authority to invade them. It makes me wonder if the CIA isn’t already present in all three places. We know they’re there in Venezuela because Trump hugely announced it, trying to destabilize the governments.
Is it your understanding that American intelligence is trying to destabilize the governments of all three countries, even though the Cubans can barely buy food, much less sell drugs?
BLUMENTHAL: Well, you can hardly call it intelligence. I don’t think the — first of all, it’s well known that the CIA has staged so many plots to topple the Cuban government and assassinate its leadership, going back to exploding cigars against Fidel Castro to bioterrorism attempts to poison Cuba’s crops. This has been exposed in declassified CIA documents. But what we’re witnessing right now is a very political, ideological attempt to destroy the linchpin of what I call the “axis of resistance” in the Western Hemisphere, which John Bolton referred to as the “troika of tyranny” — Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua.
And now Colombia has an elected left-wing president, Gustavo Petro, who was a student activist against the right-wing dictatorial regimes of Colombia in his youth and is now a sort of social democratic leader who is not perfectly aligned with the government of Venezuela but began speaking out very vocally against Trump’s show of force against Venezuela because it was killing Colombian citizens.
A Colombian fishing boat was attacked in the Caribbean by U.S. drones or U.S. naval forces. Colombian citizens were killed, and the boat had simply drifted into this area near Venezuelan waters because it was displaying a distress signal — its engine had failed. There’s no evidence that these were drug traffickers at all. It was the size of a fishing boat, which had no capacity to reach Miami. None of these boats can reach Miami. None of them are trafficking in fentanyl, if they are drug boats, and most of them are heading to Trinidad and Tobago, which is away from U.S. territory.
Sixty people have been killed, and we’re totally desensitized to these extrajudicial, illegal killings without any due process in the U.S. — I guess because we’ve woken up every day watching so many shredded children in the Gaza Strip. But this is a serious crime.
So serious that Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of Defense, is now forcing military leadership to sign NDAs in expectation of them speaking out about war crimes in the future — such a serious violation of international law, of even military protocol, that the chief commanding officer who would have been commanding this operation at Southcom has resigned.
So this is an ideologically driven operation in which, so far, the CIA — which has also for sure been active in Venezuela — has been used mainly as a PSYOP, a psychological operation, against the government in Venezuela, with Trump authorizing them to carry out lethal activity inside Venezuela.
So they’re no longer this covert force in Venezuela — they’re an overt force. And Trump is using this threat clearly out of desperation, because, as The Wall Street Journal has acknowledged, Maduro’s government is “coup-proof,” meaning they can’t actually flip people close to him, like the defense minister or military leadership. So they’re trying to scare them with the CIA.
But so far — back to my point — this is a politically driven, ideologically driven show of force. The figure driving it is Marco Rubio, who controls the NSC and, as Secretary of State, effectively is controlling this military deployment as well.
And one quick other point about Gustavo Petro from Colombia: Trump has punished him with sanctions, personally sanctioned him for speaking out against Trump’s killing of Colombian citizens. And I would love for you to interview Petro’s lawyer, who’s a friend of ours at The Grayzone, Dan Kovalik.
NAPOLITANO: Oh, happy to — give Chris his contact information. Should we expect an invasion or at least an attack on Venezuela, Colombia, and Cuba?
BLUMENTHAL: Well, this is going to focus on Venezuela. And we could expect this next week — I’m not predicting next week, but we can expect it — because of the arrival of the USS Gerald Ford, the largest aircraft carrier in the U.S. military, to potentially attack a country which poses no threat to the United States of America, never has.
Venezuela was desperate for a deal with the U.S., a win-win deal which would have lowered oil prices in the U.S. As it is, the Gerald Ford has 80 attack jets — F-18s and others — that can bombard Venezuelan cities. It’s accompanied by submarines and destroyers. It’s one of the largest shows of force we’ve seen in the Western Hemisphere.
However, it’s not enough to invade Venezuela and blast through 100,000 Venezuelan regulars as well as cooperativos — groups that are ideologically committed to the Bolivarian revolution of Hugo Chávez — and wage urban warfare. That’s not something we expect.
What’s expected is potential decapitation strikes. Lindsey Graham has actually predicted the assassination of the president of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro. So too has 60 Minutes, in a shameless propaganda piece — the makers of this 60 Minutes report, which is basically making the case for the Trump-Rubio assault on Venezuela, declared that one of three options for Maduro is that “he meets his maker.”
So they’re normalizing assassination. Now, how can assassination be justified according to the Trump administration? Are they just killing him because he’s a bad actor, as the fake U.S. ambassador to Venezuela, Jimmy Story, said? No — they’re killing him because they claim that he is the head of a narco-terrorist cartel called Tren de Aragua.
BLUMENTHAL: In reality, Tren de Aragua has no connection to Maduro. Maduro’s security forces have effectively neutralized it inside Venezuela and Venezuelan prisons. A declassified April U.S. intelligence report determined that Maduro was not directing Tren de Aragua. However, the Trump administration began to believe and classify Tren de Aragua, or TDA, as a Maduro-directed narco-terrorist organization following a series of meetings with the new Nobel Peace Prize winner, María Corina Machado, who is the face and voice of the Venezuelan opposition.
This was just revealed in a Reuters report today. She met, along with her team, with Mike Waltz when he was the National Security Director in January, and he was taking notes as they dictated to him how Maduro was directing this cartel. So now Maduro can be taken out like Manuel Noriega or Osama bin Laden — a terrorist. He has a $50 million bounty over his head.
This is also how Rubio got Stephen Miller, who’s involved in national security decision-making, on his side — because he connected the Venezuelan immigration wave and infiltration of the U.S. to the attack on the Venezuelan government.
NAPOLITANO: None of this would hold up under any kind of cross-examination. And I have to jump to two other topics just briefly before we get to the split in the Trump administration over the investigation by the Director of the National Counterterrorism Center about foreign influence in the murder of Charlie Kirk. Before we get there, why is the NYPD in Israel? What are they doing there?
BLUMENTHAL: Why do our police forces train with Israel? That’s the question. And, you know, if you’re watching this and you’re inside the United States — even in a small town, like a small college town — chances are police officers, high-level police officials in your town, have gone to Israel for training.
There’s a neocon, pro-Israel think tank in Washington called GINSA. They’ve trained thousands of American cops inside the U.S., bringing Israeli officials to train them. Then the Anti-Defamation League has taken hundreds and hundreds of U.S. police officers to Israel for training. There are other training seminars that bring U.S. cops.
It’s a form of lobbying. You know, police are considered community leaders. They often go into politics afterward. So it’s a way of lobbying them, but they’re also instilling in them a mentality that we saw on display in the Gaza Strip — in which an entire population can be criminalized and seen as potential terrorists who must be neutralized before they can potentially do harm. And that’s what’s so dangerous about this.
And it needs to be exposed. And the exposing has been done — you know, we’ve been doing it at The Grayzone. I’ve been doing it for 15 years. There was an initiative called Deadly Exchange, which Jewish Voice for Peace oversaw, to highlight this toxic relationship between major police departments like the NYPD and Israel.
And now it’s all coming out into the open because the opponents of Zohran Mamdani, who are disproportionately right-wing, neoconservative Zionists, are freaking out about public comments he made as a student activist and as an activist about NYPD and Israeli army joint training.
And I’m so glad they’re bringing these factual statements that Zohran Mamdani made out into the public as their eleventh-hour Hail Mary pass to defeat him, because it’s helping to educate the American public on something that I think very few of them would support.
Like, let’s put this to a vote or at least poll New Yorkers. Do you want the NYPD maintaining a liaison office in Kfar Saba, Israel? Why do they have an office in the heart of a country that just committed genocide and is in a perpetual state of war — whose own police abuse its citizens at massive rates?
Why did the New York Police Department enact a so-called “Demographics Unit” during the so-called War on Terror, which was modeled after how the Israeli army maps the occupied West Bank, according to the Associated Press, and which not only spied on New Yorkers but spied on Muslim students as far away as Yale and Rutgers? Why was that there?
Why has NYPD leadership — from Eric Adams’ cronies to Jessica Tisch, the current commissioner, to another deputy director of counterterrorism, Rebecca Weiner — been so involved and supportive of Israel and so determined to crack down on Palestine solidarity activism inside New York? It’s not normal, and I think New Yorkers deserve to know the truth.
And Mamdani’s election — the New York mayoral race — has now become a referendum on NYPD training with Israeli genocidal apartheid army forces. And I’m glad to see that happen, because New Yorkers will repudiate this relationship by electing him, and then it’s up to him to actually start unraveling the relationship that he has condemned so many times as a student activist.
NAPOLITANO: Look, Max, I live and work here. The exposure of all this is just driving more of his base to the polls. They think this is going to help Andrew Cuomo. Andrew is a longtime friend of mine, but if they think this is going to help Andrew Cuomo, they are totally misreading things.
BLUMENTHAL: When was the last time you spoke to Andrew Cuomo?
NAPOLITANO: When is the last time I spoke to him? I would say about three or four months ago — before the June primary is the last time I spoke with him.
Let’s get to the issue at hand. Who is Joe Kent, and why is the FBI afraid of him?
BLUMENTHAL: Well, Joe Kent was a CIA field operative who was active in Syria. His wife was killed in Syria by an ISIS suicide bomber after Trump’s attempt to remove U.S. forces from northeastern Syria was sabotaged by U.S. military leadership.
He’s someone who has some anti-war tendencies, particularly in the Middle East, ran for Congress in an area outside of Portland, and was defeated by a kind of neoconservative Democrat. It really felt like a U.S. intelligence–oriented Democrat who was liberal on social issues and pro-war where it counted. She had a massive infusion of money — Marie Gluesenkamp — and she’s voting for every war now and every aid package to Israel.
Joe Kent was brought into the U.S. Counterterrorism Center under the watch of Tulsi Gabbard, as the Director of National Intelligence, against the objections of many neoconservative Democrats. And he has been pretty much kept out in the wilderness, as far as I understand, along with Tulsi Gabbard, by these figures in Trump’s inner circle — especially Trump’s Chief of Staff, Susie Wiles.
And now Joe Kent has fallen under attack from the FBI Director, Kash Patel, someone who has pledged total fealty to Israel during his nomination as FBI Director and in a series of interviews. Because Joe Kent was seeking more transparency on the assassination of Charlie Kirk — specifically on whether there could have been other accomplices, other shooters, and the involvement of foreign governments. And we can imagine which foreign governments might frighten the FBI leadership and the Trump administration itself — a particular foreign government that Donald Trump himself appears frightened of.
NAPOLITANO: That foreign government would be the one whose head twice publicly denied that his government had anything to do with the murder of Charlie Kirk. Do we know exactly what trail Kent’s investigators are on, and what evidence they have, and why the FBI is so animated about this — that somebody with intel experience would be looking at their records? What are they afraid he’s going to find?
BLUMENTHAL: Well, first, it’s a turf battle. Patel is trying to discredit Joe Kent, painting him as a conspiracy theorist, painting the forces around Joe Kent that do not trust the official story or the way the FBI’s handled this investigation. They’re trying to discredit them before they can obtain anything that might undercut the official theory.
The official theory is unproven, but the official theory has enormous political gravity because if Tyler Robinson can be found guilty as the lone shooter who shot Charlie Kirk to impress his furry friends — because Charlie Kirk made anti-trans comments — then it justifies a massive security state crackdown on the left.
It was sort of the GOP playbook — and Netanyahu’s playbook, by the way — to paint Tyler Robinson as an Antifa leftist who might even be somehow connected to Muslims in Palestine, to just use him as the justification for a new COINTELPRO. And as soon as Joe Kent starts moving in and questioning that, it undercuts the momentum to crush the left, to crush protest, to crush dissent.
And that’s why — I assume it’s Kash Patel himself, but also forces around him — told The New York Times when they reported this that they believe Joe Kent’s attempt for greater transparency is complicating the prosecution of Tyler Robinson. In other words, it’s complicating their attempt to achieve a desired political result by pinning the blame entirely on him, when I guarantee you if you put a poll to the majority of Republican voters, but especially younger supporters of Donald Trump, they will not believe the official story at all.
So if you want to make that prosecution credible among your base, then you don’t want more transparency.
NAPOLITANO: Now, he has a team of investigators, some of whom are ex-FBI agents, others ex–other agents in the federal government. Has his investigation been shut down, or is he still pursuing it?
BLUMENTHAL: I don’t know. Another reason they would want to shut it down, though, is Miriam Adelson, Ike Perlmutter — all these pro-Israel Zionist warlord donors — they don’t want anyone poking around for some kind of Israeli tie there. They want to shut this down before it even starts.
And so, you know, you want them to fund your successor, J.D. Vance — his campaign. J.D. Vance just described Miriam Adelson as a friend at a TPUSA event. Then you’ve got to just cut this off. You can’t have them — not even whether or not Joe Kent actually obtains anything usable or actionable — you can’t have figures in your administration looking for a potential Israeli angle.
NAPOLITANO: The Daily Beast headline — you’ve probably seen this — “Keystone Kash,” that’s Kash Patel, “starts MAGA civil war over wild conspiracy claims.”
BLUMENTHAL: That’s a, you know, classic Daily Beast headline. The MAGA civil war has been raging for months and months. I think October 7th ignited the MAGA civil war because there was always going to be an element that existed in the shadows of Pat Buchanan within MAGA that was suspicious of Israel’s role and actually disgusted with its role in U.S. politics.
And they’re now stronger than ever — as you can see from J.D. Vance at his latest event in Mississippi on the TPUSA tour, getting asked about Miriam Adelson’s influence, getting asked about Trump’s conflicts of interest. As you see from Marjorie Taylor Greene’s comments about Israel shattering the ceasefire and slaughtering over a hundred civilians in a day — Israel just attacked Khan Yunis today, twice.
J.D. Vance said, “Well, Trump is applying leverage.” Where’s the leverage? He’s getting criticized from within MAGA on these very core issues.
BLUMENTHAL: So, the fight over who killed Charlie Kirk is really a proxy for these deeper issues. And it’s astonishing what we keep learning about the comments Charlie Kirk made in his final days, including these text messages which Candace Owens surfaced to his colleagues about how disgusted he was being bossed around by Zionist billionaire donors like Robert Shillman, and how he was ready to — as he said — leave the pro-Israel cause after this is all over.
That’s unacceptable to his donors. That’s unacceptable to the people around him at TPUSA, running this gigantic $80 million-a-year money-making operation. Some could even call it a money-laundering operation. The money is going to stop coming in from all these billionaires because you’re going to leave the cause. You can’t do that.
NAPOLITANO: Why did Netanyahu twice deny that Israeli agents were in any way responsible for Kirk’s murder?
BLUMENTHAL: Because so many people believed they were. And I never said there was evidence for it. I never said it. I just reported on the reality of Charlie Kirk’s final days and his misgivings about having been so supportive of Israel as he came under what he called explicitly “moral blackmail” from big Zionist donors to TPUSA.
So everybody began to believe it. And why wouldn’t they believe it, considering that Israel runs a global assassination machine that kills anyone perceived as a threat? Former Mossad Director Yossi Cohen said in a recent interview in English that Israel has infiltrated cell phone devices and other communication devices in every country in the world. They’ve not only infiltrated them — they’ve tampered with them, as they did with the pagers that were turned into exploding terror devices in Lebanon. I mean, they’re openly boasting about it. So why wouldn’t people have these suspicions?
NAPOLITANO: Let me get this straight. The FBI is afraid to have a team of professional investigators conduct a companion investigation to theirs to see if Robinson was a patsy for or otherwise influenced by a foreign government. They’re not interested in the American public — the FBI is not interested in the American public knowing an answer to that?
BLUMENTHAL: Yes. And this is the deep state that Donald Trump claimed to campaign against. The deep state’s in control. The civilian authorities who are U.S. intelligence veterans, FBI veterans who are acting in a civilian capacity, are not allowed in the room. They’re being frozen out — as they were, by the way, during the run-up to the U.S. bombing of Iran on Israel’s behalf. It’s the same thing. Only the Mossad stenographers were allowed in the room — only the sort of deep state figures.
NAPOLITANO: You know, you alluded to this earlier, and it’s now resonating with me. We haven’t heard a peep from Tulsi Gabbard in about a month. Is she totally on the outside? Does she have nothing to do with the intelligence community briefing Trump? There is legislation introduced in the House of Representatives to make her the principal briefer — or her office the principal briefer — of the president, and that legislation is meeting resistance from the neocons in the House.
BLUMENTHAL: I mean, she was kept out of the briefings over Iran during the fateful days before Operation Midnight Hammer. I assume she’s being kept out of critical briefings on Venezuela, which she used to clamor about, but which she disgracefully helped create fodder for by undercutting the declassified U.S. intelligence assessment determining that Maduro had no connection to or control over Tren.
And Tulsi Gabbard condemned the U.S. intelligence officials responsible for that brief and just made the political declaration that Donald Trump and Marco Rubio and the Venezuelan opposition wanted. So, the only time she seems to surface is when it’s politically expedient for Donald Trump for her to speak. And it’s a rather pathetic performance.
I mean, I think at this point, if you’re forced to squander all the principles that made you who you are after coming out of the morass of Anbar, Iraq, and watching your fellow soldiers get killed in another war based on deceptions and lies for oil resources and neoconservative geopolitical control — if you’re not going to resign, then you’ve basically discredited yourself.
NAPOLITANO: Max, thank you very much. Thank you for bringing this remarkable story that the Trump administration is trying to suppress, even though there was a piece about it in The New York Times. Who knows who they interviewed, but thank you for bringing this to our—
BLUMENTHAL: Judge, here’s another story. Where’s Charlie Kirk now? How was he— what happened with his body? Was there an autopsy?
NAPOLITANO: Was he not buried in a legitimate tomb?
BLUMENTHAL: If so, I don’t know — what kind of cemetery is it? Is it a Protestant cemetery or a Catholic cemetery? And is he in an urn or is he in a coffin? Where’s the autopsy? There are so many questions that still need to be answered here.
NAPOLITANO: Wow. We’re going to keep pounding away at it. Thank you for bringing this to our attention and in such an intellectually honest and articulate way, as you always are. We’ll talk to you again soon. Thank you, my dear friend.
BLUMENTHAL: Thanks a lot, Judge.
NAPOLITANO: Wow. This story is not going to go away — because of people like Max, with their personal courage and intellectual honesty, and because of the curiosity that all of you legitimately have about it.
