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Oct. 16, 2025 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
28:42
Trump Declares Covert War On Venezuela

he US neocon rush to war against Venezuela is accelerating, with a fight boat blown up off the coast, a Trump admission that the US is looking at a land invasion, and the revelation that Trump has authorized a covert CIA operation to overthrow the government. Congress is as usual invisible.

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Venezuela War Bragging Rights 00:07:38
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
With us today, we have Daniel McAdams, our co-host.
Good morning, Dr. Paul.
How are you this morning?
Got a little bit of a laryngitis.
I've got a little laryngeitis.
A little bit, yeah.
Well, a good discussion will clear it up.
Oh, let's hope so.
Maybe a bottle of whiskey.
Well, of course, there's one war I'd like to clear up, one potential war, and that's what the policy is of this government of ours is dealing with Venezuela going out of their way to start a war and then bragging about it practically.
Totally, yes.
So it's very discouraging.
And the CIA has admitted they're involved and are planning this.
But the big thing is, is we've known they've been involved.
They've always admitted and bragged about the ships that they blowed up and how many people they've already killed.
But they're always the bad guys.
You know, they're terrorists.
Then the American people will agree with that.
We don't like terrorists.
Oh, they're drug dealers.
Oh, my goodness.
We wouldn't want them.
But we don't want to end up smoking marijuana and also illegal immigration.
Well, if they're illegal, isn't that our fault?
Not where they come from or where they say they came from.
So this is a thing that is brewing, but there's an excuse to really go to war.
This is a war threat.
Matter of fact, blowing up ships and killing people, bragging about it, and then saying, guess what?
We're now, now that we have control of the oceans and they're not going to mess around with us there, we have to, this is going to be a land war now, which Daniel raises the big question in my mind, at least.
What does that mean?
Does that mean we're a step closer to troops on land?
I mean, generally speaking, I doubt if they're going to roll out 100 tanks or whatnot.
And with the things they want to bomb, they have all the weaponry.
If they get low, we'll just speed up the military-industrial complex and get them to manufacture the weapons faster.
But anyway, the words coming from the administration and the special leaders like Rubio and Ratkiff, not good news, not good news at all, especially if one is trying to promote a constitutional, non-aggressive, non-interventionist foreign policy.
This is bad news for that group.
That means we should be disappointed.
But I think the American people, when they wake up someday, they might say, why are we doing this again?
We don't even have any money.
How long is it going to go before we say that you can't fight this war anymore?
Well, the average is 10 years, goes 20 sometimes, just whittling away.
And somebody's making profits, but nobody expands their liberty.
One time I heard it said that very, very few wars, and maybe only one war especially was able to do it, have a war, a revolutionary type war or any type of war where the people ended up with more liberty.
And that was our revolution.
They claimed the American people were freer than they were under the British.
Today, though, if we take over and control Venezuela, I'm not all that optimistic that they're going to have more freedom.
Matter of fact, I worry about the opposite.
And in the meantime, not only will they have less liberty, we will have less liberty too, because we already are suffering the consequences of paying for all these wars already going on.
The question here, Dr. Paul, is what is the end goal?
What is the expectation of what's happening?
What does President Trump want to do?
This week, we've seen a very obvious increase in U.S. Venezuela.
Even just over the past couple of days, we've seen a fifth boat blown out of the water.
We are assured that they're bad guys.
However, we've seen no evidence.
We have the admission that Trump made that he is interested in land strikes on Venezuela.
The question is, again, what is the goal?
Venezuela is a country that is the size of France and Germany combined.
It is not a small country.
It's a country of 30 million people.
The terrain, some of the terrain in Venezuela is some of the most complicated, difficult rainforest terrain that you have on earth.
It's not the desert.
It's not Iraq.
It's not easy to find people.
It's perfect for insurgency warfare against the U.S. if Trump is dumb enough to send U.S. troops there.
What is the purpose of what is happening?
Now, go to this first one.
Now, this is Zero Hedge, and we do have an audio clip of the video clip of this, but Trump says he's mulling land strikes on Venezuela, and he confirms that he has signed a finding allowing the CIA to conduct covert warfare against the regime, against the Maduro government.
He says, I'll go to that next one.
He says, I authorize this for two reasons.
And he says, we're going to stop them by land as well.
Let's listen to what the president says when he's asked, specifically by a journalist, about whether he's considering a land operation against Venezuela.
If we can queue up that first video, let's listen to the president.
The next step in this war on cartels, and are you considering options, are you considering strikes on land?
Well, I don't want to tell you exactly, but we are certainly looking at land now because we've got the sea very well under control.
We've had a couple of days where there isn't a boat to be found.
And I view that as a good thing, not a bad thing.
But we had tremendous amounts coming in by boats, by very expensive boats.
You know, they have a lot of money, very fast, very expensive boats that were pretty big.
And the way you look at it is every boat that we knock out, we save 25,000 American lives.
So every time you see a boat and you feel badly, you say, wow, that's rough.
It is rough.
But if you lose three people and save 25,000 people, these are people that are killing our population.
These are boats that are being blown up without any evidence.
This whole, we saved 25,000 lives with each boat, that's a spurious claim.
There's no evidence of that whatsoever.
It's extrajudicial warfare is what he's doing.
He's killing people because he thinks they might be bad people.
There's no, you know, we can't be the arbiters of the international rules-based order if we just go willy-no.
He's happy that there are no boats anywhere in Venezuela.
Sort of bragging.
Bragging about it.
Yeah, there are no boats there.
So, but mulling a land operation.
Now, maybe he's just thinking of shooting some tomahawks from the boats offshore.
We don't know what that means, but it's definitely an escalation.
Well, you know, what I was thinking about when we started this conversation, it reminded me of a game that we used to play as kids.
It was called Capture the Flag.
Yeah.
But that was a game and it was a lot of fun.
And this looks like we're going to capture a flag and put it under our control, which is bad news.
But, you know, when I was thinking about, you know, another war like the Middle East and Ukraine, Vietnam, all these wars, there's another war that may be the biggest war, and that's the militarism of our American citizens.
Nato's New Drug War 00:15:00
Law and order now, everybody wants law and order.
I want law and order.
Matter of fact, I think if we enforced the Second Amendment, we'd have more law and order and less of this killing.
But the militarism with the troops moving in the city, along with all this foreign stuff, it's amazing that there's not more resistance to it, even though we do talk about bits and pieces and people now speaking out.
Enough is enough.
We're going broke and we're having too much inflation.
But this just doesn't make sense.
And you frequently will mention who are the advisors.
Advisors are pretty important.
And I think there's two that really are involved in this.
Rubio, you've heard of him, I think.
And how about John Ratcliffe?
He's a CIA guy.
And, you know, it's almost scarier that they're so blatantly able to just pop out there.
Like, what?
What's going on?
People say, oh, CIA, glad our CIA is in there doing the job.
But the CIA used to be, they hide about it.
So maybe you could say they're more honest, but I don't think so because these justifications of the moral justification, oh, they're terrorists, they're drug dealers, they're illegal.
This is where they dump their ill from, this is where the illegal immigrants are coming from.
So they concoct that.
So this is so unnecessary, so impractical, and I just wonder how we can wake up the American people, say, get hold of it.
You know, I know people laugh at calling their congressmen, but they will listen if there's enough.
But if there's only 2%, they don't care.
I mean, they're going to obey all the money people, all the special interests.
And that's the military-industrial complex.
That's who they listen to.
Well, you mentioned Rubio and Ratcliffe.
Those are the two neocons who are on the ascendance in U.S. foreign policy.
Rubio is sort of a lowbrow John Bolton.
He's sort of the dumb version of John Bolton.
Bolton was evil, but he's no dummy.
Rubio has taken on that role.
He wants regime change wherever he can.
That's his favorite thing.
And don't forget that Ratcliffe is the neocon who was in charge of CIA in the first Trump administration, but he also is the one who came to Trump before the U.S. airstrikes against Iran and said, we have new intelligence we just got showing that they are just days away from a bomb, contradicting Tulsi Gabbard, who said, no, no, they're not working on a bomb.
He came and he overruled her and said they are.
And the thing is, he got that information from the Mossad, and it was false information.
So these are two neocons, pro-war neocons.
They have the administrations here, and it's very, very dangerous.
But the other big thing that happened yesterday is the New York Times broke the story.
If you go to that next one, that the Trump administration has authorized covert CIA action in Venezuela.
That's Radcliffe, as you say.
He has pulled the leash off of Ratcliffe and said, we need you to send people in there.
Now, what does that mean?
A covert CIA action means probably paramilitary troops on the ground.
It means agents on the ground disrupting things, disrupting daily life, pulling off propaganda, maybe even assassinating people.
Trump was asked about that, and he refused to answer that.
So if you go to the next one, now this is from the same Times article.
He secretly authorized the CIA to conduct covert action in Venezuela, according to U.S. officials.
The authorization is the latest step in the Trump administration's intensifying pressure campaign.
It's been targeting bullets off the Venezuelan coast, as we mentioned, killing 27 people.
We don't know who they are.
But here's the point, Dr. Paul.
American officials have been clear privately that the end goal is to drive Mr. Maduro from power.
This is a regime change, covert action.
This is what the U.S. had done for years against Saddam Hussein until they finally overthrew him.
Now, here's something interesting about it, Dr. Paul.
If you go to the next one, here's Michael Tracy, who I often cite because he's very astute and he's also a cynic.
But he captures something very interesting about this announcement in the New York Times.
He says, interesting that Trump readily acknowledges that, yes, he did authorize the CIA to go into Venezuela rather than screaming fake news or denouncing the New York Times for recklessly publishing classified information.
Seems like this is one leak he's happy to have out there.
And I hadn't thought about this until Michael said that.
It's strange that the president didn't deny it, a secret covert authorization.
You wouldn't want to blow the whistle on that.
Well, let's listen.
Now, he put Michael helpfully embedded this clip in there where Trump openly admits it.
Yeah, I did it.
I'm doing it.
Let's play that clip, the second audio clip, video clip.
There we go.
Let's listen to him say, yeah, sure.
Thank you.
Case, why did you authorize the CIA to go into Venezuela?
And is there more information you can share about these strikes on the alleged state?
No, I can't.
I authorized for two reasons, really.
Number one, they have emptied their prisons into the United States of America.
They came in through the border.
They came in because we had an open border policy.
And as soon as I heard that, I said a lot of these countries, they're not the only country, but they're the worst abuser.
And they've entered their, they've allowed thousands and thousands of prisoners, mental institutions, people from mental institutions, insane asylums, emptied out into the United States.
We're bringing them back.
But that's a really bad thing.
And they did it at a level that probably many, many countries have done it, but not like Venezuela.
They were down and dirty.
And the other thing of drugs, we have a lot of drugs coming in from Venezuela.
And a lot of the Venezuelan drugs come in through the sea.
So you get to see that.
But we're going to stop them by land also.
Two things that struck me about this, Dr. Paul.
First of all, he talks about, well, I authorized covert operations to overthrow the government because a lot of Venezuelans crossed the border illegally.
What does he think if he sows chaos in Venezuela and blows the government up and completely turns the place into chaos?
What does he think is going to happen?
More people are going to run and try to escape the country.
Now, on the other one, he said, the other reason is because they are chiefly responsible or very responsible for drugs coming to the U.S.
Well, go to that next clip.
That is absolutely not true.
If you look at this, this is the U.S.'s own map.
If you can put that map up here, it shows very, very clearly that the Caribbean corridor coming out of Venezuela is responsible for only 6 to 7% of drugs being trafficked.
The 93 to 94% of drugs being trafficked to the U.S. are coming on the Pacific corridor on the Pacific side.
So what he said about the drugs as a justification for the CIA overthrow plan is simply not true.
You know, the other number he has thrown out or we know about is the number of land troops that are available.
10,000 troops are in nearby territory.
That means they're serious about this and people should be worried about it.
You know, when I heard this news on the weekend, I kept thinking, well, am I going to wake up to some of the news that the invasion has already occurred?
That didn't happen.
Thank goodness.
Maybe they'll have some second thoughts.
And that to me will just be a total disaster.
But, you know, I think that they can rationalize and saying they're bad people.
We're going to get at bad people.
We're good people.
And if we're, if we know tough, peace through strength, you know, if we're strong, they'll never attack us.
They'll never do anything.
Everybody will be happy.
All you have to do is keep building up, but never let up.
It just is a nice, nice little message for the military-industrial complex to say that peace through strength means you never give up the strength, and then you're going to get peace.
But that's not necessarily true because even all these weaponries, we're still out there looking for right now.
We're like this, Venice.
Well, this is sort of half new compared to Ukraine and the Middle East and what went on in Afghanistan and the Middle East and Vietnam and all these other places.
This is sort of minor, but it looks like they like they prepare.
They don't want to run out of targets.
And they ended up getting they have this target.
And I don't know what the polls are showing, but this is pretty new.
The seriousness of this is pretty new.
But it'll be interesting to see if the American people are saying, what are you guys doing?
Why do you need to do that?
And they would recite the propaganda.
You know, it's all to do with drugs.
And you just put out the statistics.
They said that's not exactly true.
You know, so that to me is a tragedy.
Well, you're talking peace through strength.
There is no strength when you have $37 trillion in debt.
You don't have any strength when it comes to that.
But the real question with Venezuela is: what is the president's intention?
Does he really intend to fire a few missiles into Caracas and say, hey, we did it?
Does he want to assassinate the leader of Venezuela?
Is that what he really wants to do?
He could do that probably.
He's got probably teams on the ground there.
Or is it more bluster and saber-rattling?
So he comes off looking like the tough guy, which he loves doing.
He loves the optics of being the tough guy who pushes people around.
Now, this final one, the one on Venezuela, something else that happened yesterday.
And I've actually, I'm writing something for our subscribers at the Ron Paul Institute about this.
But if you put that next one up, something else, this isn't a video.
This is just a JPEG, Dr. Paul.
This is something else that happened yesterday.
The U.S. scrambled some B-52 bombers and they were flying right off the coast of Venezuela.
And there was some concern that they may actually be on a bombing run.
It turns out they did not go on a bombing run, but they were certainly there and they were certainly noticed.
Now, here's something that you might find interesting and actually kind of funny, Dr. Paul.
So what did the Venezuelans do when they saw these B-52s off their coast?
Well, they launched some fighter jets to intercept them, or at least to show that they were there.
Guess what they launched?
F-16s.
So here we have Venezuela launching American F-16s against American B-52s.
That tells you everything you need to know about the military industrial complex.
That shows what policies are a little mixed up.
Yeah, exactly.
Well, speaking of the military-industrial complex, it's the gift that keeps on giving.
Go to that next one.
It is from Zero Hedge, make it rain.
Ukraine wants up to $20 billion in arms from NATO backers next year.
They've put their demands out there, Dr. Paul.
The hand that can never stop begging and demanding, they want another $20 billion next year.
And this is according to that scheme.
And the Europeans are so dumb that they're following along with that.
They are literally emptying out their national coffers to line up and buy weapons from the American military industrial complex to give them to Ukraine, to have them blown up, and over and over, round and round they go.
I was thinking about the odds of their scheme working.
That is, that we don't want to give them to them.
The American people don't like us skipping our stuff away.
So, but if we will let NATO do it.
But NATO has to buy them, put the money up and buy the odds of them doing that.
You just point out, Europe is not doing well economically.
Percentage-wise, they're in a lot worse shape.
So they're not likely to, you know, feed these weapons that they're going to buy and make the American arms dealers richer than ever.
That's not going to happen.
Yeah, this Pearl program where the individual NATO states buy weapons from the U.S., then they donate them to NATO, and then NATO donates them to Ukraine.
You know, it sounds like such an elaborate, such a transparent money laundering scheme to support the U.S. military-industrial complex.
I mean, that's all it seems.
Don't you think they pretend that they're washing their hands?
Yeah.
They're morally pure.
Well, we didn't give them these weapons.
We didn't do that like we've done in the Middle East.
We make them pay for it through international law.
NATO is going to help us launder these things.
It's so bad.
And at the same time, they pretend that the U.S. is the neutral moderator.
We're just here to make peace.
We're not part of this war.
And in fact, I have that final video clip that we have is Pete Hegseth admitting we are going to deliver more firepower to Ukraine.
You might want to grab your earpiece if you can and put that on.
And let's listen to that final clip because here's Hegseth.
He was over in Brussels yesterday.
As usual, he was primping and posturing and acting the tough guy.
Let's listen to what he had to say at this NATO summit in Brussels.
It's great to see you, please.
Absolutely.
Great to be here.
And Mark mentioned it, firepower.
That's what is coming.
We expect and is coming from NATO.
And it was a historic summit just a couple of months ago, brought about by leadership of President Trump to say, we need our allies to step up.
And they did, and they have in those commitments.
Now those commitments will soon translate into capabilities, which is the most important aspect of it.
And one part of that, of course, is Pearl, is the initiative where European countries buy U.S. weapons, transfer to NATO for the fight in Ukraine to bring peace to that conflict.
And if there's anything we've learned under President Trump, it is the active application of peace through strength.
You get peace when you are strong.
Not when you use strong words or wag your finger.
You get it when you have strong and real capabilities that adversaries respect.
And I believe that's what NATO is doing.
I believe that's what the Pearl initiative is.
I'm going to start it off now.
Have you ever seen two less impressive individuals than these two?
Yeah, that's the way they gain respect.
This just blows my mind that they call their talking.
And they believe this, but he never drew the line.
Voluntary Peace Through Strength 00:05:46
Well, when is it going to stop?
You know, I mean, to convince them to behave themselves and do exactly what we tell them.
You know, that's why they say most of these times the troops end up being in there or you hire the troops and then nobody knows what the end point is.
And that's why we've been in these places for decades at times.
It's going over because we don't know why we're there.
We didn't have proper authority and it's not morally correct to go in.
And then the people, why did we stay in Afghanistan?
Most people can't even find Afghanistan.
Yet, even after it settles down, have you noticed how we've never left?
We still have our bases in all those places that we've been.
So it's a sad situation.
But I put it all back to the thing that you and I have been talking about, and that is policy.
And what kind of a policy do you have with dealing with other nations and other people?
And in the same way, if you live in a community, how do you treat people in economics?
The whole world.
But if you treat it by authoritarianism and force rather than voluntarism and principle that are more acceptable, then you're going to have nothing but turmoil and chaos.
And we have it.
And this could end up badly, but who knows?
Maybe Trump will pull another surprise off and, oh, they're nice guys.
I think I'll go play cards with them tomorrow.
Or no, go play golf.
Yeah.
Well, Hegseth is so unimpressive.
And Ruth is just kind of a knucklehead, but Hegseth is so unimpressive.
He has this very one-dimensional view of the world.
If we only give more weapons to Ukraine, they will demonstrate our resolve and we will get peace.
As if a couple of tomahawks will convince President Putin, okay, that's it.
We're almost winning this war, but you know what?
We better give up now because Trump has asked us to.
This is the danger when you believe, when you have a sort of a circular group of reasoning and everyone is listening to everyone else and nobody is providing outside information.
This is not how it works.
And it will not work this way.
And this is what's so dangerous because the idea with the application of more force, we will eventually get peace.
The incentive there is for the U.S. to continue to escalate to a point where the Russians will have to respond.
And the question, again, as with Venezuela, is why for what?
How does it benefit the United States?
And the answer is it doesn't.
On the contrary, it's a detraction.
Except some arms manufacturers might ones.
But, you know, the amazing thing that history may recognize in time is a guy like Zelensky, you know, having access to the president at will and getting almost everything he demands.
And yet nothing improves.
And it just is an example of how terrible this type of policy is.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, I'm going to close out.
My Thursday is my end of the week for the show.
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Over to you, Dr. Paul.
Very good.
You know, we talk about economic policies and foreign policies and the problems that they face, but they do not follow some basic principles that I think are critical if we ever expect to get along with other people in economics or foreign policy.
And that is voluntarism.
That makes so much sense because we do this almost all every day in a certain sense.
Most Americans, you know, think their house is very special.
And that people just don't, yes, if you invite a person in, they come in.
It's a voluntarism on both sides.
But you know what the exception is?
This FBI.
I mean, that's not voluntarism.
No warning, no detail, no law and order how they're proceeding.
And even presidents can have that thrown at them.
So the deep state has so much control on some of these enforcement agencies that interrupt the basic desire and consequence of a desire to have volunteerism and getting along with people in a peaceful manner.
The world would be a lot better off because it sounds sounds sort of mysterious volunteerism.
But think of how many things that we do because it's voluntary.
The freer the society, the more volunteerism there is.
And probably the more agreements are made by handshakes rather than having an army to dictate what we want to happen.
So the foreign policy has not improved as far as I'm concerned.
And it still is authoritarian and the goals are a lot different than providing true peace.
Wanting Peace Voluntarily 00:00:17
And that isn't saying the more bombs we have, the more likely it is that we're going to have peace.
They want peace, of course, if they do exactly as we tell them.
And it doesn't work that way.
I want to thank everybody for tuning in today to the Liberty Report.
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