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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| Moments ago, sources just confirmed to CNN that the United States has seized an oil tanker that had been linked to Venezuela. | ||
| Now, Russia is responding to this seizure, saying they are the owners of this vessel. | ||
| The Trump administration has not acknowledged the Russian status, claiming the ship to be stateless, but nevertheless, you can see the sensitive nature of the situation. | ||
| Russia had sent ships to track and maybe even protect this vessel over the last 24 hours. | ||
| The United States has been tracking it across the Atlantic. | ||
| It's the same ship that the Coast Guard had tried to seize last month near Venezuela. | ||
| They were unable to board it, and the ship changed course and fled. | ||
| But now, the breaking news, the United States has seized it. | ||
| Tracking this ship as it came into the northern Atlantic. | ||
| It's been heading sort of skirting wide of Ireland, heading up towards Iceland and that sort of gap to go towards the north of Russia, the Arctic Circle. | ||
| Marine tracking experts believe a vessel of this size was likely headed towards Mamansk. | ||
| That was the track that it was on. | ||
| But that all came to a sudden screeching halt about two and a half hours ago. | ||
| Marine trackers noticing that the ship turned direction at that moment. | ||
| And this really comports with the information we're getting now that the ship has been seized by U.S. military and Coast Guard. | ||
| It has been tracked closely by them, as we say, since it fled the coast of Venezuela about two weeks ago. | ||
| What makes this even more interesting, if you will, the ship when it started its journey two weeks ago was called the Bella One. | ||
| Halfway along that route, it changed its name to the Marinara and re-flagged itself as Russian. | ||
| Not clear why. | ||
| Were they trying to get protection from Russia? | ||
| Was it always Russian? | ||
| Unclear. | ||
| The port that it appeared to be headed for in the past couple of days does appear to have been a Russian port. | ||
| But now that ship has turned around, no longer heading north for the last couple of hours, heading south. | ||
| Not clear where it will end up. | ||
| It is believed to be empty or at least devoid of oil. | ||
| We don't know what else or who else may be on board of it, but certainly enough for Russia to deploy military assets to try to give it some shadow of some kind of protection and clearly not enough to deter the U.S. Coast Guard and the U.S. military assets that seized it a few hours ago, John. | ||
| This is the primal scream of a dying regime. | ||
| Pray for our enemies because we're going medieval on these people. | ||
| Here's not got a free shot at 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're trying 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 lie? | ||
| 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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Waru, here's your host, Stephen K. Bass. | |
| It's Wednesday, 7 January at Year of Alert 2026. | ||
| Let's get right into it because we're pretty packed in this hour. | ||
| We have Sam Fattis, a career operative with the Central Intelligence Agency and now one of the grassroots leaders of the MAGA movement, and Captain Jim Finnell, a career naval intelligence officer. | ||
| Sam, talk to what has actually happened. | ||
| Can you just walk us through the mechanics of this, that we've seized a vessel on the high seas? | ||
| It looks like we've done it with a combination of special operators of the United States military and maybe even some other folks. | ||
| What went on? | ||
| So what we have is part of this dark fleet, one of these tankers that's running oil around the world to all of our adversaries that we attempted to board in the Caribbean some time back. | ||
| It didn't want to be boarded. | ||
| The narrative is we then pursued it across the Atlantic. | ||
| I think that's actually a misnomer. | ||
| We just tracked it across the Atlantic until it got to a point where it was in a position that was most advantageous to us to board it. | ||
| And then we put, I presume, Navy SEALs on board. | ||
| We have seized that tanker. | ||
| It is now under our control, and I presume it is heading back to the United States. | ||
| I've seen that it has changed course already. | ||
| It appears to be a Russian ship. | ||
| I mean, it got re-flagged, but there's all kind of reports that it's a Russian vessel. | ||
| And like you said, Jex explained the dark fleet. | ||
| We talk about this dark fleet, because this is what upsets us about around Iran and with the MULAs, you know, sending oil to the CCP. | ||
| Clearly out of Venezuela, they're sending oil to the CCP. | ||
| President Trump redirected that last night, $2 billion of that coming to the United States of America. | ||
| What is the dark fleet? | ||
| And knowing that the Russians are part of this, that we went and seized this, is this an act of war against the Russians or where does that stand on the escalatory ladder? | ||
| Well, I think what the dark fleet is, I mean, what you have is a collection of usually relatively small tankers that switch flags all the time, switch registrations all the time, and help all the pariah states of the world evade sanctions, not only moving oil directly to them, but in some cases, they're actually transferring oil at sea from one tanker to another. | ||
| So, and to one extent or the other, people's hands are hidden here. | ||
| So, yeah, absolutely could be a Russian vessel that they have been hiding behind another flag. | ||
| I think it was flagged in Guiana before it decided in the middle of the Atlantic that all of a sudden it was a Russian ship. | ||
| And what we're saying is effectively, we're not going to let you play this game anymore. | ||
| We're not going to be bogged down in this. | ||
| We know what's going on, and we're grabbing these vessels because they're violating sanctions. | ||
| Is it a provocation to the Russians? | ||
| Without question, are they going to go to war with us over seizing one tanker in the middle of the Atlantic? | ||
| I don't think so. | ||
| But as you well know, Steve, in all of these actions, the next question is, okay, what will they do? | ||
| How will they react? | ||
| Presumably, they will push back somewhere. | ||
| But at the heart of this, you know, is Trump saying to the Russians, to the Chinese, to the Venezuelans, we're going to cut off. | ||
| We've changed the rules of the game. | ||
| We're not just going to chase you around and try to pursue this through legal proceedings. | ||
| We're actually going to take these pieces off the board. | ||
| You've had two special, now I realize it was enforcing a DEA indictment the other day, but it was a military operation to support that. | ||
| So you've had two special operator involvements in the last, I don't know, five or six days. | ||
| Is President Trump sending a message also that he's prepared to, you know, not just go to court and, like you said, take action, but actually take direct military or paramilitary action to enforce what he wants, which is when somebody's got a sanction of the United States, particularly on oil, it's not going to go to the Chinese Communist Party and it's not going to go to bad actors, sir? | ||
| Yeah, without question. | ||
| And he's saying, and that's not just verbiage. | ||
| I'm prepared to put my money where my mouth is. | ||
| And so we are enforcing to one extent or the other a blockade, at least over certain cargo in regard to Venezuela now. | ||
| And there's been buzz in the press for some time that maybe various tankers are getting ready to run that blockade, basically try our hand. | ||
| So everybody who was thinking about that can look at this action and say, well, now I know exactly what's going to happen. | ||
| The SEALs are going to be on the deck and they are going to take control of my vessel and take it away and it won't be mine anymore. | ||
| That's what's going to happen. | ||
| Interesting use of a term there. | ||
| Captain Finel, let me bring you in. | ||
| Of course, Greenland, the Greenland, Iceland, UK gap, and Greenland comes into play here. | ||
| But what Sam Fettis just said is blockade. | ||
| This started, as you and I have talked about for months and months and months since we've had this vast armada, as the president refers to it, off the coast of Venezuela, I think a mini carrier strike group plus an amphibious ready group, 12 to 14,000 fleet marines, sailors, others off of Venezuela. | ||
| It started, I think, as a quarantine. | ||
| In fact, Marco Ruby said the other day, the way we're going to enforce things is we're going to quarantine and use naval forces. | ||
| The Secretary of War, I believe for the first time today, put up a tweet and said this is a blockade. | ||
| Sam Fettis just reiterated that. | ||
| Is this now a full blockade? | ||
| And maybe you can tell the audience from quarantine versus blockade, using your naval forces to basically enforce American policy. | ||
| Where are we, Captain Finel? | ||
| Well, Steve, I think, you know, the verbology can, you know, we're going to watch different words be thrown around, but typically a blockade is used in terms of military operations associated with a kind of an act of war. | ||
| Whereas a quarantine is, I think, what we've been actually doing. | ||
| You know, the taking of the Bella One, the taking of the earlier tankers a few weeks ago. | ||
| Oh, by the way, Southern Command also took the motor tanker Sophia here in the last 24, 48 hours as well off the coast of Venezuela. | ||
| So what we're doing is we're enforcing our, it's international law as well as U.S. national law against sanctions against this dark fleet that's transporting illegally obtained oil, and we're going to stop it. | ||
| And we're not going to, as you said, we're not going to go to a court of law to do it. | ||
| We have the capacity to do it. | ||
| I'm not even sure that special operations or SEAL teams were involved with this operation. | ||
| The U.S. Coast Guard cutter Monroe had been shadowing this vessel along with intelligence surveillance reconnaissance from U.S. Navy P-8 aircraft. | ||
| So we do what we call visit board search and seizure operations routinely in the United States Navy, and we work with our Coast Guard counterparts, law enforcement detachments, to do these operations. | ||
| Now, it could be that there were SEALs on board or special operations forces, but we have a capacity across the U.S. Navy and our Coast Guard to conduct these operations. | ||
| So we don't just have to have these tier one assets that are very highly trained and very elite and very judicious use of their time and effort, like we saw, I think, on Saturday night in the raid against Maduro. | ||
| So what I think we are saying to the rest of the world is read our national security strategy. | ||
| We said we're going to enforce hemispheric defense. | ||
| We have legal standing, both internationally and nationally, to interdict this dark fleet, and we're going to do it. | ||
| And we're not going to play around anymore. | ||
| And I think that's, as Sam said, that's the real message. | ||
| And I also agree with him. | ||
| I don't think Russia is going to say something about a tanker that had not been flagged Russian until just a week ago. | ||
| And they said, oh, we're now Russian and they repainted their name and put a Russian flag on it. | ||
| No one believes that. | ||
| That's a joke. | ||
| And they're not going to go to war over that. | ||
| So we're going to enforce the rules. | ||
| And, you know, we had the rules in place before, but nobody ever enforced them. | ||
| Now we're enforcing them. | ||
| And I think that's the real key. | ||
| When Maduro was in court, when he was arraigned on Monday, he said, I am the president of Venezuela. | ||
| I was kidnapped, forcibly kidnapped by American forces. | ||
| And I'm still the president. | ||
| And this is an act of war. | ||
| Right there, the difference between quarantine, and I take the difference between a naval quarantine and a blockade is a seismic difference. | ||
| A quarantine is one thing like we had the quarantine in Cuba in the missile crisis. | ||
| That was not a blockade. | ||
| When you blockade, to me, a blockade is when you're actually at war. | ||
| You're now blockading things. | ||
| Do you think that this has escalated in Venezuela with their other allies? | ||
| That would be the Mulas in Persia, particularly the Chinese Communist Party, very dependent on the oil, and even the Russians, that we are escalating up. | ||
| And President Trump is consciously escalating up here to let these folks know that if this has to go kinetic, it'll go kinetic. | ||
| But I'm putting down the screws as tight as I can put them right now with maybe a little room there to go kinetic. | ||
| Captain Finel. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I agree that a blockade is traditionally associated with kinetic warfare in a war. | ||
| But you picking up and stopping a ship off of Iceland, off of the coast of Ireland, that's a little bit different than a blockading of a planet. | ||
| No, no, but hang on. | ||
| But hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on. | ||
| Steve, hold it, hang on. | ||
| Full stop. | ||
| Captain Finnell, Steve Bannon, we've been very consistent here for the last month or so. | ||
| This is a quarantine. | ||
| And Rubio backed it up the other day. | ||
| He said, hey, we've got a quarantine. | ||
| We're going to use our naval forces to inform and enforce our policy. | ||
| It was the Secretary of War that put out a tweet this morning that said, hey, we're now in the blockade mode. | ||
| So when Secretary Pete Hexa says we're in blockade, over at the Pentagon, you don't use, you don't throw around terms loosely, do you, sir? | ||
| No, you don't. | ||
| And so we'll have to see what follows. | ||
| And I would say that the use of that term has already had an effect because there's already been Chinese tankers that were heading towards Venezuela that have stopped and turned around. | ||
| So I think part of this is to have the effect that we want, which is to say we're not going to allow Venezuelan oil to be stolen and expropriated out of our hemisphere and stolen from the people of Venezuela. | ||
| And remember, a lot of this oil was originally under American companies. | ||
| So it's all wrapped up in between this combined Venezuelan-U.S. national interest and that it's been raped. | ||
| The Chinese, the Russians, the Iranians have been, and the Cubans have been stealing from resources and the resources of the people of Venezuela. | ||
| Hang on for a second. | ||
| I'm going to keep you guys through the break. | ||
| Sam Fattis. | ||
| Jim Finel. | ||
|
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All that tragic. | |
| Here's your host, Stephen K. Bannon. | ||
| Okay, about hemispheric defense. | ||
| Captain Finnell, the Chinese foreign ministry already came out. | ||
| Tell the audience what they said about President Trump redirected, quote unquote, $2 billion of oil the Chinese were essentially stealing to the United States. | ||
| Is the Chinese foreign ministry, are they signing off on that? | ||
| Are they agreeing that President Trump can do what he wants to in the Western hemisphere? | ||
| No, the Chinese foreign ministry today came out and rejected our claims about the Western Hemisphere as the United States and that we can do, you know, we can take care of our hemisphere. | ||
| And they said that this would be dividing spheres of influence and creating geopolitical confrontation that will not bring peace to the world. | ||
| So they're basically saying we're starting a war by declaration of that. | ||
| But the reality is it was the Chinese that have declared that the South China Sea is their sovereign territory. | ||
| It's the Chinese in 2007 that told Admiral Keating, the commander of PACOM, that they wanted to divide up the Pacific between the East and the West, and China would take the Western side of the Pacific and we could have the Eastern side. | ||
| So the Chinese claims about we can't have influence in our hemisphere, where we're not claiming sovereignty over the Western hemisphere. | ||
| We're just claiming that we have influence there and we're not going to allow outside influence to come in from nations, whether they're from Europe or from the likes of China or Russia. | ||
| Wouldn't you say that President Trump, actually with the action in Venezuela and the show of force, we've never in history, we've got an armada down there. | ||
| They're the size of armadas in World War II. | ||
| I think it's much bigger than anything in the Gulf War. | ||
| I think it's much bigger than anything on the invasion of Iraq. | ||
| I mean, wouldn't you say it's co-sovereignty, sir? | ||
| Well, we're not taking ownership and saying we're occupying and we're running things like the Chinese want to do in the South China Sea. | ||
| The Chinese believe that the South China Sea is their sovereign territory and they don't care about the Philippines, Taiwan, Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei. | ||
| They're disregarding them. | ||
| We're not saying that we are disregarding the existence of Venezuela or any other Caribbean nation. | ||
| We're just saying that we're not going to allow outside influence to come in and steal resources and prop up dictators and narco-dictators like Maduro. | ||
| So I think that's the real difference is we're standing up actually for the smaller nations. | ||
| Whereas China, if you go back to 2010 at the ASEAN summit, their foreign ministry said, we're a big country and we can do whatever we want. | ||
| That's not what America is saying to the countries of Latin America. | ||
| We're not saying we're a big country and we can do whatever we want and you'll obey us. | ||
| What we're saying is we're trying to free you up so that you can have access to your own resources. | ||
| You can be sovereign nations and we will protect you from rapacious nations like China, Russia, Iran, and others in Cuba. | ||
| So that's the real difference. | ||
| We're standing up for small nations, whereas China says we will do whatever we want because you're a small nation. | ||
| They take the view of might makes right. | ||
| I don't think that's what we're standing up for right now. | ||
| Sam, you've spent your career in service to your country in kind of these, you know, gray areas, dark areas. | ||
| One thing I think has not been covered enough, the Swiss government announced within the first 24 hours, I think it was Saturday afternoon after President Trump's press conference, that they were freezing the assets of Maduro and anybody else associated with his regime from Swiss banks. | ||
| I found that stunning because I've just seen activity where it's taken years and years and years of legal to even find out if they have assets, not even coming out and volunteering it. | ||
| How big a deal is that? | ||
| I mean, this to me shows you that the tariffs are working, but most importantly, they understand, the Swiss banks understand that President Trump's no games. | ||
| I'm not playing games here. | ||
| We're going to clean this mess up. | ||
| Your thoughts on that? | ||
| I think it's a huge deal. | ||
| Maduro is in New York City. | ||
| If there's a God in heaven, he'll spend the rest of his life in prison. | ||
| Maduro being gone does not mean the regime fell. | ||
| And there are a lot of people that are at least as bad, even worse than him, still in power in Caracas, cutting off their assets, cutting off their access to money, impacting not only their capacity to stay in power, but affecting any thoughts they have of we can skip out whenever we want and go live the high life on Lake Geneva. | ||
| These are all other dimensions that have to be covered. | ||
| You know, you wake up in Caracas today, you've still got really bad people calling the shots. | ||
| So we have to be addressing that. | ||
| Sam, last question. | ||
| Regarding the Mulas in Persia, you've seen the power of using naval forces smartly. | ||
| You've seen the power of quarantines to effectuate American policy and now blockades. | ||
| I have argued forever, let the Persians deal with the Mulas. | ||
| We don't need the Mossad. | ||
| We don't need the IDF. | ||
| We particularly don't need United States commandos, special forces, or, you know, horribly, maybe even American infantry or more air assets. | ||
| You can do this by doing what you're doing in the Caribbean right now in the Gulf of America to shut down these oil shipments because you've sanctioned them. | ||
| Couldn't we do the same thing in the North Arabian Sea and outside the Straits of Hermuz to shut down the Mulas and cut off the Chinese Communist Party? | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| There's no question we could. | ||
| I mean, look, you know this as a naval officer. | ||
| We are set up already with a basis to support that in the Fifth Fleet right there. | ||
| And God knows we should not go down the road of even thinking about putting American troops on the ground in Iran. | ||
| And we also shouldn't think that this is going to be resolved overnight. | ||
| I mean, the people are fed up and they want the regime to go, but the regime is really good at killing and torturing and disappearing people and hanging on, despite the fact that the Persians have wanted them gone for a long time. | ||
| Sam, you spent, just for the audience, before you bounce, how much of your career did you spend at the CIA? | ||
| And how much of your career did you spend in that particularly broader, bad neighborhood, sir? | ||
| So I spent 30 years total in the IC and 20 of that was undercover with CIA. | ||
| And virtually all of that was in the Middle East and South Asia and, you know, working against, amongst other people, the Iranians for a really, really long time and running Iranian assets cross-border into Iran for a very long time. | ||
| Sam Fettis has a lot of street credits. | ||
| Sam, where do people go? | ||
| You're one of the leaders of the grassroots part of the MA movement. | ||
| Where do folks find you? | ||
| Best to go to Substack, Substackandmagazine.substack.com, A-N-D magazine. | ||
| It's fantastic. | ||
| Thank you, sir. | ||
| Appreciate you joining us today. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Captain Finnell, you've made the argument here for naval power and for rebuilding our fleet. | ||
| I think we're seeing the importance of that now. | ||
| My question to you, North Arabian Sea, Straits of Hermuz, we don't need the Mossad. | ||
| We don't need IDF. | ||
| We certainly don't need American troops owning American aircraft. | ||
| All of the situation of bringing the Mulas to the knees and letting the Persian people take care of it is simply to do what we're doing in Venezuela, cut off the oil to the Chinese Communist Party. | ||
| Can the American fleet do that, sir? | ||
| I think we can. | ||
| We have the ability to interdict like we're doing right now, whether it's a quarantine or a blockade of what's going on in and out of Venezuela. | ||
| The Chinese are turning around. | ||
| We have the ability to provide influence into the Middle East. | ||
| My great concern is that we've seen the power and the influence of maritime assets in this operation off of Venezuela in a relatively benign area or benign environment. | ||
| I'm concerned about what happens if the Chinese decide to take Taiwan right now, or what happens if China decides to do something against the Philippines or as they've been pressing recently against Japan and the entire Ryuku Island chain. | ||
| Are we able to operate and do the same kind of operations 9,000 miles away from CONUS? | ||
| And I'm not sure that we are. | ||
| And so I don't want us to learn just lessons for benign environments. | ||
| We need to learn lessons for highly contested environments against an adversary who's playing in their backyard as opposed to us playing in our backyard. | ||
| Jim. | ||
| Jim, I believe that it's quite analogous to the summer of 1941. | ||
| And I'm a huge proponent of cut the Chinese off of all chips, all access to education in this country, cut them off. | ||
| And I'm a huge advocate of cut off the oil from Venezuela and cut off the oil from to put them on, let's see how tough they are. | ||
| Is that going to jam them up like we jammed up the Japanese in the summer of 1941? | ||
| I think President Trump is well aware of that comparison. | ||
| And that's why he said in his press conference on Sunday, and I think he reiterated it on Air Force One, that he's not going to stop oil flowing to China. | ||
| But what he now has is a chip in the game, so to speak, which is to say, we need rare earth elements, China, and you need oil. | ||
| So if you're going to play with us and try to withhold rare earth elements from us, guess what we can do? | ||
| So we just gained another chip in the great game. | ||
| And President Trump seems to be very adept at playing this. | ||
| And so I think he's going to be sensitive to that. | ||
| And there's a way that we can do this to where we can buy time to regain our resources, regain our military strength, and to demonstrate to China that they don't want to go there. | ||
| And I think that's the real challenge right now is do we have enough time to restore our military power, the naval power that we've gutted for 35 years? | ||
| And I think the president's well on his way to do that. | ||
| This thing about Switzerland seizing the assets of Maduro and his cronies, that's phenomenal because it shows the power of what the tariffs did. | ||
| A year ago, you know, when the president imposed those tariffs last year, the Swiss government at the time, they kind of played games and didn't want to believe that that was happening. | ||
| And Trump didn't lift them. | ||
| And they were shocked. | ||
| So now you have a new president. | ||
| They put a new president on January 1st. | ||
| They rotate among seven. | ||
| And the new president immediately made this move without any consultations, without a referendum, without a national debate, because he understood that he needs to get across to President Trump that Switzerland is going to play ball. | ||
| And they may not like that in Switzerland. | ||
| They may say that's an infringement on their neutrality. | ||
| But the reality is the tariffs have had a great impact and are a game changer in how we deal with other nations. | ||
| And I think the president understands it. | ||
| And he's playing, he's adjusting those knobs, if you will, in ways that I can't even comprehend. | ||
| And it seems to be working. | ||
| 5D chess. | ||
| Captain Finnell, thanks. | ||
| We'll push your writings out. | ||
| Look forward to having you back on here, sir. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Now more than ever, when the Swiss are in on the act, now more than ever, do you think you need to know pattern recognition and the process of how gold's values derived, why gold has been a hedge against times of financial turbulence for 5,000 years of mankind's recorded history? | ||
| Text Bannon, B-A-N-N-O N, at 989898. | ||
| Birch Gold, Ultimate Guide for Investing Gold in Precious Metals, including silver in the age of Trump. | ||
|
unidentified
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War Room. | |
| Here's your host, Stephen K. Bass. | ||
| We've got a $2 trillion annual deficit. | ||
| You know, we have, what, $38 trillion in debt and heading up? | ||
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| Trust me, if the IRS and Scott think you owe him money, he's going to come and get it. | ||
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| Take the anxiety and angst away. | ||
| Talk to the pros at Tex Network USA. | ||
| Cody Weddell joins us from the Daily Telegraph, one of my favorite papers, one of my early first reads every day. | ||
| It's published in London. | ||
| Of course, the site's up 24-7. | ||
| It's becoming a global player. | ||
| Huge footprint here in the United States. | ||
| Cody, if we put the headline up, brother, I absorb news as people know, just for the doing the war room. | ||
| One of the most shocking stories I have read, but to me, it made total sense, was your story the other day where you say, and you've got sources, you and the Miami Herald have sources that say that this whole operation with Maduro was basically about a negotiated deal in Qatar with Qatar being an intermediary with the United States for the vice president of Venezuela today, | ||
| who's kind of running the show down there under obviously the direct or indirect guidance of the president of the United States. | ||
| She made a deal to serve up Maduro to save the regime. | ||
| Can you walk us through this, sir? | ||
| Yeah, so we know that back in October, these meetings started taking place. | ||
| They involved the UAE and Del Codriguez, who is now the acting president there in Venezuela, and as well her brother, who is highly involved in the government. | ||
| And we know there were at least two offers made, one in April and one in September, for some type of transition in the country that would not include Maduro. | ||
| And it would include one of them was to have Del Codriguez as the acting president, which is what we have now. | ||
| And another one was to allow a former general who had defected from the government to return to the country and serve as the acting president. | ||
| Now, this is all reporting from originally from the Miami Herald, but certainly relevant now that Del Codriguez is actually in power. | ||
| The United States clearly didn't accept that offer at the time, but quite clear that those channels remained open and that there was some type of deal to allow this sort of to all happen. | ||
| Well, hang on a sec, because at the same time, Grinnell, and I know the president, in fact, Marco summed it up, I think, pretty well the other day at the press conference. | ||
| The president gave Maduro every opportunity, different proposals, listened to him, had Grinnell involved, other people involved over and over again. | ||
| Basically, I think it was to go into exile, either Spain or probably Turkey, maybe take some money with him, but get off all charges and live happily ever after. | ||
| And it continued to blow the president off. | ||
| And eventually, with Trump knowing him personally, you're going to hit a tripwire after a while. | ||
| As that was going on, you're saying that Delsey, she approached, she initiated this because she's an interesting character. | ||
| Remember, her family is kind of what I call a mafia or mob family that's been around for decades. | ||
| I think it was her father was in the business of kidnapping American executives of oil companies back in like the 60s, 70s, and 80s and holding them for ransom. | ||
| So did she approach us as President Trump was working with Maduro and he kept saying no, no interest and just blowing us off? | ||
| Did she approach, did she understand that eventually something was going to happen? | ||
| So she approached us through intermediaries in the UAE and Qatar. | ||
| It's not clear who approached whom, but I mean, there were some, there were conversations there, and we know that Jorge Rodriguez, her brother, and she as well have been very involved in negotiations involving the U.S. Going back for years. | ||
| They have been sort of the central figures of contact for Richard Grinnell, for U.S. negotiators. | ||
| Jorge Rodriguez was central in the Barbados Accords, which ahead of last year's elections supposedly would have allowed for free and fair elections in Venezuela, which, of course, the regime there in Caracas backed out on. | ||
| So it's not clear who approached whom, who initiated this contact, but we do know that it happened. | ||
| And it's quite clear just because these two figures within the government have the most amount of contacts with U.S. negotiators, with officials in the UAE. | ||
| It's quite clear that something there was worked out. | ||
| Do you is in your article? | ||
| And I know you're doing additional reporting now and investigative reporting. | ||
| Should the audience take away that no matter what the public declarations of the vice president down there and others, that given the fact that somehow there was, it looks like there was maybe some sort of potential deal with intermediaries Qatar and UAE, that things should go, no matter what the public sayings are, but things should go maybe a little more organized than other efforts that we've had in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. | ||
| It's hard to tell. | ||
| Of course, Del Codriguez right now, she has to give these sort of defiant statements. | ||
| She has to try to hold together that government coalition that Maduro left behind. | ||
| And we've seen her and also his son, Maduro's son, he has been active in supporting Del Codriguez, even though these reports are emerging that she was likely a central figure in betraying Maduro to turn over to allow this operation to take place. | ||
| So I think she has to come out and say, we demand Maduro be returned. | ||
| That's something I think that is for the domestic audience. | ||
| She's already started to flip a little bit on that. | ||
| We saw yesterday she said she's planning to work with the United States, which was a dramatic flip within like 24 hours. | ||
| So she's already softened her stance a little bit. | ||
| We'll see if the U.S.'s ultimate goal here is actual regime change, actual transition, democratic transition. | ||
| It's clear those channels are open, but what is being exactly discussed, we're not sure. | ||
| Cody, I take it you're working this file every day. | ||
| This is your top effort is focusing on what's happening down there, sir. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| I'm on the border right now here in the town of Cucota, Colombia. | ||
| I was up at the edge of the border yesterday. | ||
| Everything's pretty calm here. | ||
| We could see Venezuelan troops, the National Guard, just on the other side of the other side of the border. | ||
| But there are cars going back and forth. | ||
| Colombia is beefing up its security on this side of the border. | ||
| We saw armored vehicles sort of lining the street right until the entrance to the bridge that leads into Venezuela. | ||
| So, yes, I'm continuing to cover the story here and currently on the board. | ||
| Make us smart. | ||
| What's the thing this audience, because one of the powers of the worm is to be ahead of the curve. | ||
| What should our audience be looking for of some of the developments you think are going to come up? | ||
| I think we have to see what Delsy Royga is, if her rhetoric continues to evolve over the next few days. | ||
| Clearly, like I said, it evolved from one day to the next in about 24 hours. | ||
| Do we continue to see those statements from her indicating that she's willing to work with the U.S.? | ||
| Trump has already said if she's not willing to work with the U.S., there could be a phase two of this. | ||
| So the threats there from Trump are clear. | ||
| So let's see what she says over the next few days. | ||
| And she also has challengers to her power. | ||
| I mean, I think it's quite clear the interior minister who has been the enforcer of the government over the years, really a ruthless character. | ||
| His name is Diosdado Cabello. | ||
| He certainly would like power as well. | ||
| So even within that government structure, that regime structure, she's going to have some trouble, I think, holding that together. | ||
| When Nicolas Maduro took power in 2012, 2013, there were questions about whether he could hold together this coalition of the regime. | ||
| He was able to do that. | ||
| Now, will she be able to do it? | ||
| I think there's a lot of resentment among a lot of sectors within the government. | ||
| So that's going to be a difficult task for her. | ||
| And then she also has to deal with working with the United States, negotiating with the United States. | ||
| So she has a really difficult job. | ||
| I think there's certainly a chance we see some type of coup, internal coup there. | ||
| So I think those are the things we need to watch for in the next few days. | ||
| Cody, where do people go on social media to get your reporting? | ||
| I take it's all coming through the Daily Telegraph. | ||
| Where do people go to stay up with you? | ||
| Because you have important and interesting insights into what's happening down there. | ||
|
unidentified
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Sure. | |
| I'm on X. | ||
| It's CO Weddell. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| Cody Weddell. | ||
| Cody, what is my name? | ||
|
unidentified
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You can find me there on X. Look forward to keeping up with you, sir. | |
| Thank you so much. | ||
| Great article. | ||
| Great piece. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
|
unidentified
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Thanks. | |
| Grayson Mo, let's put that out there. | ||
| It's important. | ||
| Okay, I want to play from Matt Gates' show, an interview from last night. | ||
| Let's hit it. | ||
| Do you believe that FBI has been fully exposed and held accountable for any increased criminal acuity that they contributed to on that day? | ||
| So that's a great question. | ||
| Most people focus in on the FBI. | ||
| I'm of the argument that based on the legal framework of the legislative branch and the capital, the jurisdiction itself, there's a statute called 2 USC 1967B sub 1 lays out the jurisdiction of the U.S. Capitol Police. | ||
| And they have primacy over the Capitol buildings. | ||
| And then by extension, the Capitol grounds along with MPD. | ||
| For the FBI to have a role in the Fed surrection, if you will, they had to have operated under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Capitol Police. | ||
| Now, I'm not disagreeing You that there were 274 out there. | ||
| That's what Kash Patel released out there. | ||
| But in order to get to the totality of that Fed surrection, it starts with the legislative branch. | ||
| And downstream from that, you had DHS potentially, MPD undercovers, FBI undercovers, CHSs, and then affiliates. | ||
| And so I always say that it starts with the legislative branch, which cannot be FOIA, which cannot be Brady requested through a judicial process because it's a co-equal branch and they're going to hide behind that essentially Praetorian guard of information to disclose it. | ||
| That's why I say the only solution to get to the FBI's role and the legislative branch's role and the U.S. Capitol Police's role and the Capitol Police Board's role and as well as the political leadership role of the bicameral bipartisan leadership of the legislative branch is you have to look into the senior lawyer's work product to be able to expose all of it. | ||
| And that name is Tad DeBias, Thomas Aquinas Debias. | ||
| And the only person that can compel that is currently the Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, by ordering this House, his House Sergeant at Arms, which as of January 3rd through the next year, is the chairman of the Capitol Police Board. | ||
| That is the political solution. | ||
| And I think that's the immediate, easy steps that can be taken tonight, literally, or tomorrow when they come back in into session to have those discussions. | ||
| So hopefully this airs and maybe gets to the right people. | ||
| And we can start the process of getting to the transparency part of January 6th and then effectively furthermore investigating the murder of Ashley Babbitt by Michael Byrd, right? | ||
| U.S. Capitol Police officer. | ||
| The one time in America's 250-year history that someone was slain inside of the Capitol without any transparent investigation for the public to see. | ||
| Okay, we're going to go to break. | ||
| Two of my favorite people there: Matt Gates and the Colonel, Colonel Ivan Reitling. | ||
| An individual who was there every day that I was in federal court to have my back and to take on the protesters. | ||
| A guy who's tough as bootleather and very smart. | ||
| But how we get to the bottom of J6, the Fed Surrection, next in the world. | ||
|
unidentified
|
From those ashes, broken matches. | |
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| Also, All Family Pharmacy we had on the morning show, the great Bobby Kennedy and Brooks Rollins. | ||
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| Meet with those people today. | ||
| You're going to love it. | ||
| Just outstanding. | ||
| Colonel, you were there every day for me. | ||
| And this is, you know, my team so appreciate it. | ||
| Had these nutcases outside attacking, attacking, attacking. | ||
| And every day I had the Rock of Gibraltar, which is the Colonel. | ||
| Colonel, you spent all day yesterday up on the Capitol. | ||
| The President of the United States is going to see this. | ||
| We'll make sure he watches the clips every day, but because he's got so much going on, but this is a top priority. | ||
| Just take a couple of minutes and walk through, just assume you're in the Oval Office. | ||
| Just talk to the President of the United States. | ||
| What do we need to do to get to the bottom of January 6th, sir? | ||
| Okay, so January 6th and everything downstream from that was basically under the framework of the United States Capitol Police, the Capitol Police Board, and the legislative branch. | ||
| Meaning, there's a statute called Title II U.S. Code, Chapter 29. | ||
| And in that statute, you have two really relevant sections, 2 U.S.C. 1967, paragraph B1, which lays out where the U.S. Capitol Police has jurisdiction to criminalize anybody. | ||
| And so every single J Sixer was criminalized under that statute. | ||
| And they were done so under with evidence from another section, 1979B, where it is up to the Capitol Police Board to decide whether or not they're going to provide CCTV footage that's incriminating or exculpatory over to the Department of Justice. | ||
| How? | ||
| Because they have the authority to do so and they decide based on their own political whims. | ||
| Well, who is in charge of the Capitol Police Board? | ||
| It consists of the two sergeants at arms that work for the Speaker of the House on the House side and the Senate Majority Leader on the Senate side, unless the Vice President, the President of the Senate, takes on that role as the Senior Constitutional Officer on the Senate side. | ||
| Now, understanding that framework that the chair of that Capitol Police Board rotates between each of the sergeants at arms every year on January 3rd, as of a few days ago, the chair of the Capitol Police Board is now the House Sergeant at Arms who works for Mike Johnson, Speaker Mike Johnson. | ||
| And the individual's name is Bill McFarland. | ||
| Now, Bill McFarland can basically be ordered by Speaker Johnson to then go ahead and have the Capitol Police Board direct the U.S. Capitol Police Chief to have the general counsel of the Capitol Police to release all deliberative documents, | ||
| text messages, communications, planning, et cetera, et cetera, of the general counsel, as well as the Capitol Police writ large to disclose the planning for the actions on that day and any communications and coordination after January 6th that would include anything related to the evidence creation and coalition, | ||
| if you will, that was then sent over to the U.S. Attorney's Office, Matt Graves, during that period of time of total weaponization, as well as any coordination between Tad Debias, the general counsel, with Jamie Raskin, who was the lead impeachment manager for impeachment hoax number two, and furthermore, the Fed Surrection Cover-Up Committee's staff director, David Buckley, who was one of the 51, oddly, One of the 51 spies who lied along with John Brennan. | ||
| So when Tom Fenton says that there were CIA assets under his FOIAs on January 6th, I would suspect that the person that would know exactly who those CIA personnel were was the former Inspector General of the CIA under John Brennan, who later became the Fed Surrection Cover-Up Committee staff director, David Buckley. | ||
| So to summarize, Steve, the way you get to the truth of January 6th and the Fed surrection component of it is you have to obtain all documents and communications that are in the general counsel's office of the U.S. Capitol Police because that is the deep state of the deep state within the legislative branch because he remains the senior officer pre-J6, on J6, post-J6 that remains in his position, Thomas Aquinas Debias. | ||
| And the only authority that can really get him to release it. | ||
| I mean, I would recommend seizing his everything, put him on administrative leave and immediately, or maybe even detain him. | ||
| But if that's too aggressive, seize everything that he has and start to sift through it. | ||
| And I think the best people that would need to look through it would be a coordinated effort between, say, for example, somebody like James Blair, the deputy chief of staff at the White House, working with Marshall Yates over at the FBI, Ed Martin at the DOJ, and then lastly on the legislative side of things would be Barry Lautermilk along with his staff. | ||
| That's how I would form kind of a task force to dig through that. | ||
| But keep in mind, elements within the Republican Party will try to block that from happening, specifically the current chair of the House Administration Committee, which is the essentially replacement lackey for Paul Ryan. | ||
| So you got to keep an eye on that member of Congress from Wisconsin first. | ||
| Colonel, social media, where do people go to get all this? | ||
| Yeah, so I'm on X. I'm on Getter as well. | ||
| And I'm on Substack kind of detailing out some of these things. | ||
| And there's a lot more detail in this. | ||
| And if you go into detail, you find the devils. | ||
| And that's all I try to focus in on is to find those devils and demons in our government. | ||
| Colonel, you're the best. | ||
| Thank you for joining us here. | ||
| Hey, thank you, Steve. | ||
|
unidentified
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I appreciate it. | |
| We've got another powerful hour of the war room is upon us. | ||
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| Johnny Kahn takes you out with this powerful ballot on the first anniversary of the Palisades fire. | ||
| Back in a moment. | ||
|
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Clear skies I can see through my eyes. | |
| And I know one day I'll smile again after it burns. | ||
| After it burns. |