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Now, Donald Trump is insisting that the main reason he's interested in Venezuela, the main reason the US is kind of looking at tankers off the coast of Venezuela comes back to drugs, the trade, the smuggling of illegal drugs out of Venezuela. | |
| But what if it's not just that? | ||
| Maybe there's something else going on. | ||
| What if it's partly about oil? | ||
| Now, on the surface, you might be thinking, why does America even need Venezuelan oil? | ||
| And I can kind of understand your point, because if you look at just total oil production, look, this is up until 2005, the US was there, Venezuela was there, Saudi Arabia was there. | ||
| But as you probably know, you know, since then, everything has changed. | ||
| Look, American output has gone through the roof, way above Saudi Arabia, way above Saudi Arabia. | ||
| And Venezuela has gone basically to the floor. | ||
| And that's going to post Chavez Maduro. | ||
| They're one of the minnows now, and I think 21st biggest producer in the world. | ||
| So again, that question, why should America care? | ||
| Well, in the US, that big rise is largely down to this. | ||
| It's down to the shell revolution. | ||
| So you've got fracking all around the US producing extraordinary amounts of crude oil. | ||
| And here's where we get to the interesting bit. | ||
| Because when you're thinking about crude oil, maybe you're just thinking about, well, look, barrels of oil. | ||
| It's all the same, isn't it? | ||
| Well, actually, no. | ||
| So if you kind of look at crude oil, there are various different types of crude in different parts of the world. | ||
| There's actually kind of various different ways you can categorize it. | ||
| But one way you can look at it is look at the kind of density. | ||
| So you're basically looking at how thick that crude is. | ||
| And when I say thick, I mean literally how thick. | ||
| This is showing you global production broken down by the density of that oil. | ||
| And so you've got the kind of medium stuff. | ||
| And this is probably, if you're thinking, if you've got a kind of image in your mind of what crude oil looks like, it's a bit like this. | ||
| You know, it's kind of black, but it's not too viscous. | ||
| It flows around. | ||
| But there's other stuff as well. | ||
| So this, this is light crude. | ||
| And it kind of almost looks like a smoothie, doesn't it? | ||
| And that's the same stuff. | ||
| This is still crude oil, but down to the kind of geological and the biological conditions in the ground when it was being formed, you know, hundreds of millions of years ago, it comes out looking a bit different. | ||
| And so that's light. | ||
| You've also got heavy stuff. | ||
| And it's kind of relatively small in global production. | ||
| But this is gloopy, super viscous stuff, heavy oil. | ||
| So heavy, medium, light. | ||
| Remember that. | ||
| And remember also the key thing here is you get it out of the ground, it may look like that, but ultimately you still need it to go into someone's car or indeed be turned into chemicals. | ||
| Basically, you need to process it. | ||
| Major breaking news from Venezuela. | ||
| President Trump says the United States successfully carried out a large-scale strike against Venezuela in an overnight operation. | ||
| In a social media post, he added that Venezuela's leader, Nicolas Maduro, and his wife were, quote, captured and flown out of the country. | ||
| This operation was done in conjunction with U.S. law enforcement. | ||
| President Trump will deliver a news conference from Mar-a-Lago at 11 a.m., joined by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Dan Kane. | ||
| In a brief interview with the New York Times, President Trump called the mission, quote, a lot of good planning and lot of great, great troops and great people. | ||
| It was a brilliant operation, actually. | ||
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Some of the refineries in America. | |
| So here are some of the refineries. | ||
| There's this. | ||
| There's one in LA there. | ||
| These are the 10 biggest. | ||
| You've got some up here around kind of towards Canada. | ||
| We'll kind of come to that in a second. | ||
| But a lot of them are down there, kind of Texas, Louisiana, on the coast. | ||
| And here's the critical thing. | ||
| These refineries are primarily set up for heavy oil, for taking that gloopy stuff and turning it into gasoline and all of the other different products. | ||
| But here's where things get interesting. | ||
| Remember that chart I showed you a moment ago, the one which showed kind of shale oil and how it kind of went through the roof. | ||
| The oil that's generally produced with shale oil, the fracking oil, that comes out of the ground mostly in the light form. | ||
| So it's the smoothie. | ||
| It's sometimes actually even clear. | ||
| It comes out of the ground clear rather than black. | ||
| And that's the majority of American production right now. | ||
| Shale oil tends to be light stuff. | ||
| And actually, that's kind of going back 10 years. | ||
| Look at where we are now. | ||
| Look at those bars. | ||
| In the last few years, the amount of light oil being produced in the US has gone up and up and up, and the amount of heavy stuff has gone down. | ||
| But back to those refineries. | ||
| They need to be fed. | ||
| If America's going to have gasoline, it needs to feed those refineries with heavy oil. | ||
| So if you look at the kind of imports coming into America, in recent years, even though America is producing so much oil, more oil than it ever produced before, it still needs to suck in loads of oil from overseas. | ||
| And the type of oil we're talking about, it used to be, it's mostly heavy crude. | ||
| It used to be only 12%. | ||
| So only 12% of imports were heavy, gloopy crude. | ||
| Now, it's about 70%. | ||
| So 70% of the oil coming into America, which it needs to basically keep its economy going, is heavy crude. | ||
| Heavy crude come from. | ||
| Well, here are some of the big countries where you find most of it. | ||
| It's Canada and Venezuela. | ||
| There's one other I'll come to in a second, which we'll come back to. | ||
| But it's Canada and it's Venezuela where you get most of this heavy crude oil, which is why I've had to think about where those refineries are. | ||
| They're mostly set up, kind of you've got some in the north there to get the heavy oil coming out of Canada, and you've got some around the kind of Louisiana and elsewhere and Texas to get that heavy oil that comes in from Venezuela. | ||
| That was kind of the way they were set up. | ||
| And it's really expensive to rebuild these things. | ||
| You can't just chuck out a refinery very easily overnight. | ||
| Some came from Mexico and the Gulf of Mexico as well, and that's pretty heavy too. | ||
| So that's the picture in America. | ||
| And the upshot is, even though America is producing more and more oil, the imports, this is showing you imports of oil into America, are still really high. | ||
| And if you break down those imports by the country that stuff is coming from, well, there's Venezuela, and it used to be a decent slug, actually more coming from Venezuela just about than from Canada, just at the turn of the millennium. | ||
| But now look at what's happened since. | ||
| Right now, Canada has gone from 15% of all of the US imports of oil to 61%. | ||
| 61%. | ||
| And Venezuela is basically next to nothing. | ||
| But here's what's tantalizing, and here's the reason I think that a lot of people are looking towards Venezuela and thinking, well, there's more to this than just drugs. | ||
| Look at total oil reserves around the world. | ||
| The higher these bars are, the more oil there is in the ground. | ||
| So that hasn't yet been taken out of the ground. | ||
| So there you've got Saudi, Iran, Iraq, all of the usual suspects. | ||
| But the biggest of all, and this is according to various different sources, the biggest of all is Venezuela. | ||
| And what's that oil? | ||
| It's the heavy, tari stuff that you might well want to put into those American refineries. | ||
| And there is really only one other place in the world that has a kind of serious amount of heavy oil other than Canada and Venezuela. | ||
| And lo and behold, guess where that is? | ||
| It's Russia. | ||
| All of which is to say, you know, it matters what kind of oil America needs. | ||
| It's worth just delving into these kind of nuances because that helps you understand a little bit more about the backstory of geopolitics. | ||
| It was slightly busy, I would say. | ||
| It was very dark all over, especially in Venezuela. | ||
| The team did an incredible job. | ||
| They rehearsed and practiced like nobody's ever seen. | ||
| And I was told, and I was told by real military people, that there's no other country on earth that can do such a maneuver. | ||
| If you would have seen what happened, I mean, I watched it literally like I was watching a television show. | ||
| And if you would have seen the speed, the violence, you know, they say that, the speed, the violence, they use that term. | ||
| It's just, it was an amazing thing, an amazing job that these people did. | ||
| Nobody else could have done anything like, you know, we were prepared to do a second wave. | ||
| We were all set and very, this was so lethal. | ||
| This was so powerful that we didn't have to, but we're prepared. | ||
| We're out there with an armada like nobody's ever seen before. | ||
| And we're prepared and we're prepared. | ||
| And frankly, probably thought we were going to have to do it, but we were prepared for a second wave going in. | ||
| This is the primal scream of a dying regime. | ||
| Pray for our enemies because we're going medieval on these people. | ||
| You're going to not got a free shot all these networks lying about the people. | ||
| The people have had a belly full of it. | ||
| I know you don't like hearing that. | ||
| I know you've tried to do everything in the world to stop that, but you're not going to stop it. | ||
| It's going to happen. | ||
| And where do people like that go to share the big line? | ||
| MAGA media. | ||
| I wish in my soul, I wish that any of these people had a conscience. | ||
| Ask yourself, what is my task and what is my purpose? | ||
| If that answer is to save my country, this country will be saved. | ||
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Here's your host, Stephen K. Bannon. | |
| It's Saturday, 3 January, Year of the Lord, 2025. | ||
| A stunning and dazzling overnight strike by U.S. forces. | ||
| They've extracted Maduro and his wife from Venezuela with just a bold and brilliant raid. | ||
| He's now been indicted in the Southern District of New York. | ||
| The President of the United States Commander-in-Chief, along with Secretary War Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, are going to give a press conference at Mar-a-Lago at 11 o'clock. | ||
| And War Room's going to stick with it and give you both pregame analysis and post-game this morning. | ||
| We've got an all-star lineup of some of the smartest people in the world that have dealt with this situation. | ||
| I will start with Eric Prince. | ||
| Eric, you have been on the show now, I think for years, I might say, saying the way to bring this to a head is to go in and extract Maduro. | ||
| Talk to me about your thoughts of what happened in the last couple of hours. | ||
| The phrase the president was looking for was speed, surprise, and violence of action. | ||
| And U.S. forces definitely delivered. | ||
| Certainly a magnificent job. | ||
| It's truly the most refined, decisive kinetic action operation organization I think the world has ever seen. | ||
| You know, back after the debacle of Desert One and the Iran hostage attempt, a rescue attempt in 79, when Congress created SOCOM, it was done to create the money and the focus to have this kind of capability, absolutely apex predator, go anywhere in the face of whatever surface-to-air missile, air defense networks, whatever. | ||
| And remember, Caracas is at about 3,500 feet. | ||
| So you got to go from sea level up a mountain plateau into this bowl and hit a lot of targets simultaneously. | ||
| And they did. | ||
| The targeting and the intelligence to do this was spectacular. | ||
| I also must add, I'm extremely glad to see that they bombed Chavez's grave as an extra FU to the cancer of socialism that has infected Venezuela. | ||
| As I said on your show a few weeks ago, you can vote in socialism, but you have to shoot your way out of it. | ||
| And for the people of Venezuela that voted a year ago, July, in free elections, and it was stolen, Maduro lost by 40 points. | ||
| F him. | ||
| I'm glad he's in New York. | ||
| I hope there's some other bad people that they have to take out. | ||
| Diestado Cabello, Pedrino, the Minister of Defense, Jorge and Del C. Rodriguez, Diestado Cabello, they all have to go. | ||
| And then Venezuela has a chance at breathing free. | ||
| This is not going to require U.S. occupation or anything else, but it took away the inevitability of the regime. | ||
| And to see people breaking out and protesting in celebration all across Venezuela is a very, very great sign. | ||
| And also in Chile. | ||
| So what we're going to do to walk through this, there's a huge geopolitical and is there going to be stability or civil war? | ||
| We're going to get to all that, but I want to focus on just the military strike part of it, which is a capability that is extraordinary. | ||
| This is breathtaking. | ||
| Being a young naval officer and being there for the workup for Desert One, they don't run things. | ||
| Back then, what they run today is a totally different deal. | ||
| This is absolutely breathtaking. | ||
| You combine the end of the 12-day war with that strike, including from the Navy submarines. | ||
| You add this. | ||
| The American people have to understand now the geopolitics of it, strategically, what's going to happen, what's going to happen in Venezuela. | ||
| We're going to get to all that. | ||
| Mike Davis is going to join us about the legality. | ||
| They're already on Trump about that. | ||
| We're going to cover it all. | ||
| But just the mechanics of the capability of can you do it? | ||
| No military in the world. | ||
| It's breathtaking what our troops, what our sailors, Marines, Special Forces have done. | ||
| We're going to go through all that. | ||
| We got Captain Finel, L. Todd Woods. | ||
| Todd Woods was a Delta Force pilot, helicopter pilot. | ||
| The Eric Prince is with us. | ||
| Pesobi is going to join us, Mike Davis, all of it leading up to the presser. | ||
| And of course, we're going to have all the geopolitics, economics. | ||
| I want to thank the Denver team and my own production team here at the war room. | ||
| That cold open, nothing short of magnificent. | ||
| You got the entire package right there of what happened and maybe why it happened. | ||
| Short commercial break. | ||
| Johnny Khan takes us out. | ||
| We're going to come back. | ||
| It's a stunning overnight achievement by the Commander-in-Chief, President Trump. | ||
| Back in a moment. | ||
|
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I got an American fame. | |
| In America's heart. | ||
| Kill America's Voice, family. | ||
| Are you on Getter yet? | ||
| No. | ||
| What are you waiting for? | ||
| It's free. | ||
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| It's where I put up exclusively all of my content 24 hours a day. | ||
| You want to know what Steve Bannon's thinking? | ||
| Go to get her. | ||
|
unidentified
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That's right. | |
| You can follow all of your favorites. | ||
| Steve Bannon, Charlie Kirk, Jack the Soviet, and so many more. | ||
| Download the Getter app now. | ||
| Sign up for free and be part of the new pick. | ||
| Okay, I want to make sure whether you're interventionists, non-interventionists, you think this is part of the MAGA strategy, not part of the MAGA strategy, whether Maduro should go, all the geopolitical aspects of this, the geoeconomic aspects of this. | ||
| Also, what's going to happen? | ||
| Is it going to be stable? | ||
| Is it going to collapse in the Civil War? | ||
| We're going to get to all those topics. | ||
| But the first is just the ability to do it and to have American troops and American military that's coordinated enough to actually pull it off. | ||
| No military in the world can do this. | ||
| Now, the geopolitics, does this tee up Taiwan or she, all that? | ||
| We're going to get to that moment. | ||
| But, Eric, let me just go back there. | ||
| And we get Todd Woods, who's actually a Delta Force pilot after he came out of the Air Force Academy. | ||
| Just walk people through the logistics, how complicated we've got, or President Trump said Armada. | ||
| We've been talking about this. | ||
| You've got a carrier strike group. | ||
| You've got an amphibious ready group. | ||
| We've had, I don't know, 12,000, 14,000 fleet Marines, sailors, special operators, special forces, and we've been pouring Hegseth, Pete's been pouring people through, I think, the Dominican Republic or Port of Puerto Rico, I think. | ||
| Just walk through to the knowledge, to what you know, because you've been advocating something along these lines of a quick strike that can take care of at least the problem with the Maduro, maybe not with his bad ombres that are around him. | ||
| Just walk me through what you know about this strike and how complicated it was to pull off and how proud we should be of our forces. | ||
| The Maduro regime has spent a lot of money on building out something. | ||
| They spent a lot of money on defense. | ||
| And the Russian air defense systems, the Pancier, anti-aircraft cannons, the S-300s, all of that stuff would have been on high alert because of the presence of all those ships offshore. | ||
| And the fact is, the U.S. could come in, turn the lights off. | ||
| I'm sure they turned the power off, turned the phones off, turned the ability of those surface air missile systems to even function, destroyed them, and to fly helicopters right into an urban area like that and to get everybody out clean is truly spectacular. | ||
| It is an enormous amount of coordination. | ||
| Congrats to Pete Hegseth and General Kane and the entire Department of War. | ||
| It's amazing what you get when you focus on merit and lethality instead of politics and social engineering. | ||
| And it works. | ||
| This is exactly what we want our military to be: a snarling attack dog waiting to be let off leash. | ||
| And they did it last night and they did it really well. | ||
| Now, when you take that magnificent capability, and if you're going to park it in Venezuela for the next 20 years, right now you have a like a diamond-bladed four-foot-long chainsaw with a big motor. | ||
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Okay. | |
| It can go and cut through anything. | ||
| But if you park it there for 20 years and do nation building, it's like cutting a tree with a railroad spike in it. | ||
| It destroys the blade. | ||
| And that's what the endless war is, the nonsense of Iraq and Afghanistan did when you allowed lawyers to be making decisions instead of warriors. | ||
| Warriors made their decisions. | ||
| Can you? | ||
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And that's what works. | |
| Just I want the audience to understand, they went in and extracted the dictator. | ||
| This is not like some democratically elected guy that's like some liberal or whatever. | ||
| This guy was hunkered down. | ||
| He knew that the Americans were coming from him. | ||
| He put a bounty on his head. | ||
| They knew he, you know, this is the type of guy like Saddam Hussein that's changing residences every night to actually go in, know exactly where he is, extract him and the wife, right? | ||
| And we know there may be a few casualties on the Venezuelan side, but it doesn't sound like it was a massive shootout to go in and know exactly where he is, given the fact that he's hunkered down. | ||
| You know, they got tremendous defense capability to extract it and come out essentially, it looks like bloodless, is breathtaking, is it not? | ||
| And sends a signal to every bad guy in the world that you're not beyond the reach of the United States military, sir. | ||
| And to put an icing on the cake, Steve, there was a high-level Chinese delegation, military delegation in Caracas trying to sell them more Chinese weaponry. | ||
| And so those dudes, I'm sure, were hunkered down in their hotel hearing, I guess, in the words of Mamdani, what rugged individualism looks like and feels like instead of that warm embrace of collectivism. | ||
| While I've got you, I know you got to bounce. | ||
| Why I got you. | ||
| Just let's talk about the geostrategically for a moment. | ||
| This is, you know, I wanted to start about this analysis they had on the oil. | ||
| Of course, he was extradited and I think already indicted in the southern district. | ||
| He hasn't been arraigned. | ||
| Our understanding is he is headed to New York with the wife to be arraigned in the southern district. | ||
| I think that may take place actually today. | ||
| It was on drugs and being a narco-terrorist and a narco-state and stealing the election and all the terror he's done. | ||
| Oil is a big part of this. | ||
| Between Venezuela and Guiana, you know, bad news for his for the Gulf Emirates because they're not as important. | ||
| Also, Iran's his big partner. | ||
| I think they've got Hezbollah down there. | ||
| They've got the Chinese Communist Party down there. | ||
| Just geostrategically, how big a deal is this? | ||
| Here's the thing. | ||
| It was actually an incentive for the Russians to let Venezuela be as screwed up as it was for as long as it was because it took probably 2.5 million barrels a day of production offline. | ||
| There is an enormous, as the, as your prelim said, enormous amount of crude in the ground in Venezuela, but it takes a lot of special processing equipment. | ||
| And a lot of that stuff has been largely rotting and unmaintained for years and years and years. | ||
| So great opportunity. | ||
| There's a reason Venezuela was called El Dorado. | ||
| There is unbelievable natural resources in the country. | ||
| Venezuela hit its peak in like the early 70s, 80s, because there was a lot of Italians and Germans that went there as part of the oil business and built it out. | ||
| It was an extremely successful growing economy and they voted in socialism. | ||
| And this is what they have now. | ||
| Look, the intervention in 89 to take out Noriega from Panama was necessary. | ||
| That guy was an absolute narco-thug and sitting aside super strategic waterway like the Panama Canal. | ||
| I would put Venezuela in the same boat because of the money they can generate that they used to spread narco nonsense and leftist leftist rot across all of Latin America in the Caribbean. | ||
| It's good. | ||
| And the fact is they've had an election a year and a half ago and now an actual representative government can take power. | ||
| Yes, there's going to be problems Venezuela. | ||
| It's not going to be perfect, but it is the pendulum is starting to swing in the right direction. | ||
| And kudos to the U.S. military for doing a spectacular job in removing that guy from power. | ||
| You've been on here now for over a year talking about maybe two years talking about this. | ||
| When you discussed it, you actually talk about there's another ring around him, his inner circle. | ||
| And you've mentioned those guys at the beginning. | ||
| I think they're still there. | ||
| In fact, I think they've picked a successor. | ||
| So if his bad ombres are not leaving, how comfortable are you that the second and third order magnet, the second and third order events that are going to happen? | ||
| Are you comfortable that this has been thought through? | ||
| And we're not going to just, this thing's not going to devolve into a civil war? | ||
| I think there's a different negotiating position now. | ||
| If the Trump administration, people can say, we highly encourage you to step down or take the money and leave, because look what happened to number one. | ||
| And, you know, the Venezuelan military folded like a napkin in that kind of press. | ||
| So look, this is especially near and dear. | ||
| We planned an operation like this from the private sector if Venezuela, if the Venezuelan, free of Venezuelan government was able to be able to fund it to do something like it at this scale. | ||
| Obviously, not to the spectacular level of performance that JSOC just did it. | ||
| And good on him and congratulations. | ||
| So, yes, the terrain, the difficulty, there are some bad people there that need to go, but they should be in a very different frame of mind right now, seeing that their leader is in bracelets in a Gulfstream aircraft headed for prison in New York. | ||
| You can't think, you know, what's happening in the streets of Tehran, right, with this kind of uprising, as we've talked about, the sanctions are killing these guys. | ||
| We've argued you got to shut the oil down, but the Persian Riol is crashing. | ||
| The economy is so bad. | ||
| I think they've shot and killed now five to seven protesters. | ||
| Venezuela was actually one of the MULA's best strategic partners. | ||
| Do you think this is inextricable? | ||
| Do you think this is linked? | ||
| The timing of this is linked to what's happening in Iran? | ||
| Look, this timing is based on what needed to happen in Venezuela. | ||
| The fact is the Iranians had a significant presence in Venezuela, including a drone factory making a lot of the same long-range drones that were used to attack U.S. ships in the Gulf of Aden off of Yemen and to attack Israel and other U.S. targets throughout the Middle East. | ||
| The other thing to be watching for is the Chinese are planning some big quarantine exercise where they surround Taiwan with all their ships. | ||
| And if they actually try to close it off, the question is, will the Navy guarantee freedom of navigation in the South China Sea and around Taiwan? | ||
| Will they have to do convoys to escort merchant ships to breach that Chinese PLA Navy quarantine? | ||
| That's the next flashpoint you should be watching for. | ||
| Last thing, you think Hezbollah, there's all this talk. | ||
| They've had Hezbollah training camps. | ||
| The Venezuelan, Maduro is very close to them. | ||
| Do you think that could be a problem here in the United States? | ||
| There's been thousands and thousands of Iranians that have flown to Venezuela and be re-badged as Venezuelans. | ||
| Some of them have come to America. | ||
| Possible there could be reprisals. | ||
| This is why secure borders matter. | ||
| The biggest issue will be kneecapping the cartels because the narco business, Venezuela is really not a production point, but it is a transshipment and processing point for all the drugs coming out of Colombia, Peru, Bolivia, et cetera. | ||
| There's 34 industrial-grade processing facilities. | ||
| Those need to be liquidated, and that cartel infrastructure needs to be really squeezed on. | ||
| Or that's the thing that makes the makings of a narco insurgency kind of like the FARC was in Colombia. | ||
| Eric, hang on for one second. | ||
| I know you got to bounce, but I want to send everybody to the site for the phone. | ||
| So stick with us for a couple more minutes. | ||
| Captain Finnell, L-Todd Woods, Mike Davis, Jack Posobiec, leading up to the press conference at Mar-Lago with the Commander-in-Chief. | ||
| Short break. | ||
| back in a moment. | ||
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Here's your host, Stephen K. Bannon. | |
| Eric Prince, pretty good called shot. | ||
| You've been talking about this for a couple of years and it rolled out basically like you said it would. | ||
| Talk to me. | ||
| Where do we go to get your new phone and then we'll let you bounce, sir? | ||
| I appreciate you taking time away. | ||
| By the way, new information, they're unsealing a new indictment in the southern district right now. | ||
| Mike Davis is going to look through that. | ||
| Mike Davis is going to join us momentarily. | ||
| Also, he is part of now ships company, Madura and his wife, on the Iwo Jima, an LHA. | ||
| That's, I think, the flagship of the Anfib Ready Group. | ||
| Eric Prince, closing thoughts, and where do we go to get your phone? | ||
| So, Steve, you can get the phone at unplug.com. | ||
| You can also get it at Best Buy, but go to unplug.com/slash warroom. | ||
| We built this phone for free people to protect their First and Fourth Amendment rights. | ||
| It protects your data. | ||
| It lets you be in the world, but not of the world, and not let big tech collect and own all your data. | ||
| Extremely dangerous in an era of AI. | ||
| We are on the way to becoming an American-made phone. | ||
| We're in the process. | ||
| We're doing a raise right now, and we'll make our next tranche of phones in the United States. | ||
| So, go to unplug.com slash warroom and get your phone now. | ||
| Any closing thoughts, sir, before I let you go? | ||
| The next key next days are key. | ||
| They need to remove a great book called The Dictator's Handbook on How do you do regime change against dictatorial regimes? | ||
| This is the next two weeks will be critical and to get adult leadership in there and actual security capability to kneecap the cartels. | ||
| Hopefully, there are some patriots amongst the Venezuelan generals that will rise and protect a free Venezuela now. | ||
| Eric Prince, thank you so much, sir. | ||
| I'll talk to you after the show. | ||
| Great job. | ||
| Thank you, Steve. | ||
| Great job. | ||
| Jack Pesobic joins us by phone. | ||
| Jack, you're a naval intelligence officer. | ||
| Intelligence here, at least on the strike, had to be pretty damn good, right? | ||
| They knew exactly where he was, exactly how to get him, and extracting, sir. | ||
| Steve, as of 0,400 Eastern Standard Time, every single world leader who is an adversary of the United States was suddenly woken up by the head of their security detail saying, sir, you might want to put on the television because this just showed them that no matter where you are, no matter how secure you think you are, no matter how safe you think your defense is, your security is, | ||
| the United States of America and the United States military has the capability to reach out in the middle of the night and get you, your family, and everyone around you with the flick of a pro, with the, you know, the snap of President Trump's fingers. | ||
| And when President Trump says go, that is exactly what the United States military does. | ||
| And Steve, I know you and I were talking about this, the 15,000 U.S. Navy sailors that were parked there off the coast of Venezuela throughout New Year's, throughout Christmas, saying it looks like there's an operation imminent. | ||
| A lot of people talked about this. | ||
| And now we see that this is a culmination of those operations. | ||
| And we know that a variety of operations were given to President Trump. | ||
| And this is the one that he ultimately went with. | ||
| One of the things that I'm looking at right now, obviously, you mentioned earlier, of course, what will be the status of those massive oil reserves in Venezuela, those untapped oil reserves, some of the largest, the largest in the hemisphere between them and Canada. | ||
| And then, of course, what comes of the regime? | ||
| Are we seeing full-on regime change, or are we simply seeing a removal of Maduro? | ||
| Of course, all of this is going to be playing out in the coming days, weeks, and months. | ||
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Yeah. | |
| For our troops, for our special operators, Navy, fleet, Marines, you know, just a magnificent day. | ||
| But you talk about hemispheric defense, and you talk about what's happening in Iran and between America first, interventionists. | ||
| I mean, put in perspective right now as MAGA wakes up to this and sees a magnificent military operation. | ||
| And folks, I'm going to tell you, if you look at the two expeditionary operations we've had from mid-July with the ending of the 12-day war so dramatically and then the dramatic extraction of Maduro and his wife, and now they're sitting on the Iwo Jima right now, probably in the captains, in the captain's captain's cabin. | ||
| Pretty extraordinary. | ||
| But what about the bigger picture here? | ||
| Particularly, you know, Eric Prince had been on here. | ||
| You have been on here for over a year talking about this. | ||
| We didn't get the bad ombre. | ||
| So it looks like a very specific decision was made not to take out some of the worst elements of his regime. | ||
| How do you think this plays out? | ||
| Well, I think that it's personally, I think that it seems to be to me, and this is just my analysis, that the strategy is remove Maduro, but the rest of the regime stays in place. | ||
| And hopefully then they get a more pliant regime, a regime that is more willing to cut these deals with the United States, return those oil flows back into the United States, into the world energy supply. | ||
| But with the corollary being that you will cut ties with China and Iran and push them out, because Venezuela has been the base of operations for Chinese, excuse me, China, Iran, and Russia. | ||
| So it's been the base of operations for Chinese intelligence, Russian intelligence, and so many Chinese commercial operations, which are spreading throughout the Caribbean. | ||
| The People's Republic of China is taking over the Caribbean Sea and even elements of the Gulf of America. | ||
| And people need to understand that from the Panama Canal all the way up. | ||
| And Venezuela has been, as well as Cuba, have been their key benefactors. | ||
| So I wouldn't be, by the way, I would not be surprised if the Cubans are waking up right now saying, get President Trump on the phone because we don't want to talk to that Rubio guy. | ||
| The narcoterism part too. | ||
| I mean, this puts it's a crossroads. | ||
| Obviously, the fentanyl from China, but the CCP had their military delegation there yesterday, right? | ||
| I mean, it couldn't have been a better calling call for President Trump to say, hey, look, we got our eyeball on you. | ||
| We know exactly what you're doing. | ||
| And they dropped this dime on these guys when they're there, but also the narco-terrorism part. | ||
| You know, Colombia today, the president's going nuts. | ||
| He's not in a good place. | ||
| The Cubans are not in a good place. | ||
| So is this part of overall hemispheric defense and we're going to clean up this mess in Latin America? | ||
| Or is this just the neocons talk him into it, sir? | ||
| Well, look, of course, the neocons have always supported these types of operations. | ||
| I'm sure the neocons wanted to go further. | ||
| And we've got a huge special up right now at Human Events talking all about what the neocons did in Iraq, Syria, in Ukraine, what they have done in Afghanistan, and then the 20 years of trying to import democracy on these places. | ||
| It doesn't work. | ||
| It simply doesn't work. | ||
| However, it seems that Trump, and if you go back to the strategy document, go back to the strategy document that was put out, they talked about hemispheric defense. | ||
| Remember, the Monroe doctrine with the Trump corollary, the Monroe doctrine with the Trump corollary, that we will clean up the mess. | ||
| This is what President Trump is executing on. | ||
| He was very public about this. | ||
| And so, the question that I have looking forward when we're talking about these narco-terrorist syndicates is: are they going to hit the Mexican drug cartels next? | ||
| Are they going to take out capture-kill operations for every single one? | ||
| Go Pablo Escobar on these guys. | ||
| All right. | ||
| And by the way, you know, I know officially we say that the United States was not involved in that decapitation operation, but let's just say behind the scenes, people talk, all right? | ||
| People talk about who actually took the shot on Pablo Escobar. | ||
| All I'm saying right there. | ||
| So we need to do that to every single one of these cartels and to the people like the president of Colombia and the friend and Shinbaum down there in Mexico, who do play all this happy talk saying that they're partners of the United States, when in reality, we know that they are working hand in hand with the cartels, looking the other way while the Candelas conduct the operations. | ||
| The question is no longer up for debate. | ||
| You will work with the United States or you will get Maduro. | ||
| Is the timing of this tied to this uprising you see on the streets of Iran, sir? | ||
| Well, it certainly could be. | ||
| I mean, it's hard to say that events in South America could be tied to something that's a world away in the center of the world island over there, the capital of Persia, the ancient empire. | ||
| But certainly there's no question that there are no conspiracies, but there are no coincidences. | ||
| And so when we look at this, we do have to wonder whether or not there are elements that are looking to potentially maximize on these uprisings that are going on in Iran right now. | ||
| Jack Bosobic, where do people go? | ||
| I know your Twitter feed is going to be hot today. | ||
| Where do people go to catch up with you, sir? | ||
| It's going to be hot. | ||
| And we've got our Tales of Regime Change series that's going on right now that couldn't be more timed. | ||
| And I want to thank War Room and the entire War Room engine room for supporting that and getting that up to say, look, when the United States goes and conducts these regime change enterprises in various parts of the world, there are times, look at Ukraine, look what Ukraine turned into, look what Iraq turned into, look what Ira, look what Afghanistan turned into. | ||
| And then you have people saying they want to do the same in Iran. | ||
| We have to be very careful about this and how we conduct these types of foreign policies. | ||
| We can't go down the road of George Bush and George Soros. | ||
| No, absolutely not. | ||
| President Trump is saying he's forming a new road. | ||
| We're going to back him. | ||
| We're going to see how that goes. | ||
| But at the same time, Steve, what I'm seeing right now is people are saying, look, if President Trump could do that to Maduro, I want him to do that to every single one of these illegal criminals that's there in the United States right now. | ||
| Get them out, blackback them, put them on the Iwo Jima, and have the United States Navy send them packing. | ||
| And by the way, by the way, maybe you throw in a couple of Mamdanis and Fritzkers and Newsom's while you're along with it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, at least Mondame. | ||
| I'm Mondame Omar, that whole crowd. | ||
| I think you go do it. | ||
| Jack, by the way, the timing of the book on humans, just amazing. | ||
| Your new series, just incredible. | ||
| The timing couldn't be better. | ||
| One more time. | ||
| Social media, where do people go? | ||
| At human events. | ||
| It's on podcasts. | ||
| It's on Spotify, racing up the Apple podcast charts. | ||
| But of course, there's another podcast called The War Room with Steve Bannon that is slightly ahead of us. | ||
| Well, you can get up in our draft. | ||
| Jack, great job. | ||
| Go back to the family. | ||
| I'll track you down later in the day, sir. | ||
| God bless. | ||
| We're going to get Mike Davis up in a minute about the legality. | ||
| I want to bring L. Todd Woods. | ||
| And this is also the reason that you want to understand gold as a hedge right now. | ||
| I think markets on Monday may be on fire, right? | ||
| Of course, this is another shift in geopolitics. | ||
| This may be a massive shift because the oil shift, the oil assets here are breathtaking when you talk about Venezuela and Guiana and about the America's need for overseas hemispheric defense and maybe get off the Eurasian landmass. | ||
| L. Todd Woods, you came at the Air Force Academy. | ||
| You were kind of a Delta Force pilot. | ||
| You've done these operations before. | ||
| We've got a couple of minutes here before break. | ||
| What went on last night, sir? | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| I flew for the Air Force Unit 20th Special Operations Squadron, which at the time, Prince mentioned the Desert 1 debacle. | ||
| We were tagged with that mission until the Army got more capabilities. | ||
| So I did that in the early 90s. | ||
| Our customers were Delta Force and ST-6 or SIAL Team 6. | ||
| We had to get them anywhere, as you mentioned. | ||
| No matter the threat, no matter the timing, no matter the weather, that was our job. | ||
| And I want people to understand that this is a much bigger operation than what you see on the news. | ||
| There were literally hundreds of aircraft involved. | ||
| You've got aircraft coming in to bring in, you know, typically how this goes down is the Rangers will temporarily take an airfield and block off any traffic in and out of there and allow U.S. aircraft to get in there. | ||
| And then you have the special operators coming in and rotary wing aircraft to the target, extract the precious cargo and either take them to the airfield or take them to a ship here. | ||
| I'm not sure what happened, but this is a big dance. | ||
| And literally, you will have helicopters coming into a target and then five seconds with fire coming on the target and then the fire will let up like five to ten seconds before they arrive. | ||
| So it's very choreographed. | ||
| They practice this. | ||
| He mentioned they practice this over and over. | ||
| The president mentioned that. | ||
| They likely set up some type of practice area. | ||
| And so it's extremely complicated. | ||
| You got CSAR, you got strike aircraft, you got command elements. | ||
| And it's a very choreographed dance. | ||
| And kudos to the boys for getting this done. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Todd, hang on. | ||
| I'm going to hold you through. | ||
| Captain Finel's with us. | ||
| Also, Frank Gaffney. | ||
| We're heading up to the 11 o'clock, the 11 o'clock briefing by the president press conference at Mar-Lago. | ||
| We're going to cover it all live and be around for analysis and observations after it's over. | ||
| Short commercial break. | ||
| Take your phone out. | ||
| Text Bannon, B-A-N-N-O-N, at 98-9898. | ||
| Get the ultimate guide, which is totally free and with no obligation from Birch Gold for investing in gold and precious metals. | ||
| Don't forget silver and the age of Trump. | ||
| Short break. | ||
|
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Stephen K. Mack. | |
| Okay. | ||
| Todd Woods is going to stick around. | ||
| Captain Finnell's here. | ||
| We're going to get into the logistics of this magnificent extraction. | ||
| But I want to get so Mike Davis immediately. | ||
| In fact, a New York Times reporter had President Trump's number. | ||
| And folks should know a couple of three reporters may have his number. | ||
| He called him. | ||
| President Trump gave him 50 seconds and actually teed up this 11 o'clock press briefing. | ||
| The second question this guy asked him is, well, do you really have the legal authority to do this? | ||
| I mean, already they were on President Trump. | ||
| So you've been the biggest advocate of in Project 2025 in the years in the wilderness, the inherent, going back to President Lincoln, the inherent powers in Article II of the president of the United States as commander in chief to repel an invasion and actually to, you know, get into a, you know, get basically try to put down a conflict between some bad guys that are trying to destroy the United States. | ||
| And in this case, maybe just enforcing a, what, a warrant from a federal court. | ||
| What happened here? | ||
| What powers did the president use today, sir? | ||
| Well, there's an indictment out of the Southern District of New York, a four-count indictment that Attorney General Pam Bonbi just released. | ||
|
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It was unsealed. | |
| It's a four-count indictment for narco-terrorism conspiracy, cocaine importation conspiracy, possession of machine guns and destructive devices, and conspiracy to possess machine guns and destructive devices against the United States. | ||
| And so there was this indictment that was unsealed. | ||
| There was an arrest warrant, and the president executed this arrest warrant and went and got the Venezuelan president, Nicolas Maduro, and his wife, and he brought them back to, he's bringing them back to court in New York City. | ||
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They're going to stay in a Brooklyn jail. | |
| The president absolutely has that constitutional and statutory power to do that. | ||
|
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Separate from that, remember what Maduro did. | |
| Maduro unleashed Trende Aragua terrorists on the United States who kidnapped, raped, tortured, and murdered Americans, including Lake and Riley. | ||
| We have people, we have hundreds of thousands of Americans who have died from fentanyl poisoning because of Maduro and his wife. | ||
| And so the president absolutely has the Article II and statutory power to do what he did. | ||
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There's no question about it. | |
| And I would say to the Democrat politicians who are crying about this today, President Trump made it much easier for these Democrat politicians to go have more garrisons with Maduro in this Brooklyn jail. | ||
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They don't have to travel down to Venezuela. | |
| They don't have to travel down to Caracas to do it now. | ||
| Yeah, and they don't have to go to El Salvador to have my ties with them. | ||
| So you're saying here that the indictment, this was he was actually using his power as the chief magistrate and chief law enforcement officer since there was an indictment from the Attorney General in a federal court, the Southern District of Manhattan, to allow the military to go execute on that indictment and to bring him in as a criminal. | ||
|
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Yeah, Southern District of New York in Manhattan. | |
| And there was a separate indictment in 2020, also. | ||
| So there are two different indictments. | ||
| This is the latest indictment, and these are very serious charges. | ||
| Maduro and his wife are going to spend the rest of their lives in federal prison in the United States. | ||
| And so, you know, this is President Trump is following the rules. | ||
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His attorney general is following the rules. | |
| I want to say congratulations to President Trump and his team, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, the Attorney General Pam Bondi. | ||
| They did a lawless job of executing this arrest warrant and bringing these alleged criminals to justice. | ||
| Mike, do you think the reason now you had the Article II powers as Commander in Chief, and we've had this with Trend Aragora and what he's trying to do to the United States and obviously killing people with the drugs that are coming up here, which is also part of the indictment. | ||
| It's one of the things that just does jump out here because we've been talking about this now from when President Trump got back, but Eric Prince had been talking about this even in the first term. | ||
| They did not round up the rest of the bad hombres, right? | ||
| And he's got some very bad ombres that are his inner circle. | ||
| Do you think that's because they very narrow casted this around this indictment? | ||
| Let's go extract this guy and getting back to a federal, getting back on federal charges, and then we can negotiate with these other guys. | ||
| I mean, I'm sure these other guys are co-conspirators or part of it. | ||
| Why would they not go in and get those on enforcing this indictment? | ||
| I think President Trump was correct to focus on getting these two big fish and getting them out of Venezuela, getting them into U.S. custody. | ||
| Note, I'm not saying where Maduro's security forces put up much of a fight. | ||
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So there were no American deaths. | |
| I don't think there were American injuries, or at least none were reported. | ||
| You look at the Venezuelans celebrating on the streets of Caracas around the country, Venezuelans in America. | ||
| I don't think that too many people in Venezuela are losing much sleep. | ||
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I think they're pretty happy about this. | |
| And I've actually had a meeting with this opposition leader, Maria Karina Machado. | ||
|
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She's very pro-America. | |
| She's very tough. | ||
| And if she's the next leader of Venezuela, that's going to be a very good thing for the United States of America. | ||
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We're going to have a key ally in Venezuela. | |
| Remember, Venezuela was once a very wealthy, successful country before Chavez and Maduro destroyed this country with their left-wing Marxist socialism. | ||
| And I think that a leader like Machado can restore Venezuela and make Venezuela great again. | ||
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And I look forward to that day. | |
| We won't have Venezuelans flooding our country if they have a country they can go back to. | ||
| Mike, where can people go for Article 3? | ||
| We're getting ready to start the press conference down in Mar-a-Lago. | ||
| We'll try to track you down afterwards. | ||
| Any new information, but where do people go in the interim, sir, your social media and Article 3? | ||
|
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Article3Project.org, article number 3project.org. | |
| You can donate, follow us on social media, and the war room posse superpower. | ||
| As always, is action, action, action. | ||
| And thank you, Steve. | ||
| Thank you, Mike Davis. | ||
| Track you down later. | ||
| Okay, we're taking a short commercial break. | ||
| The press conference is supposed to start in Mar-lago. | ||
| Of course, as these things go, may start a few minutes late, but we've got a lot of folks to talk to. | ||
| And we're going to stick through the press conference and we're going to wrap up afterwards with the new information President Trump, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Kane, Secretary of War Hexa, Secretary of State Rubio, give us in this press conference. | ||
|
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We'll have observations and analysis after. | |
| Short commercial break. |