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Dec. 3, 2025 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
31:05
Hegseth In Hot Seat As 'Murder gate' Picks Up Steam

Was he there? Was he somewhere else? The White House and Pentagon can't seem to get the story straight on the "double-tap" murder of survivors of a US extrajudicial killing off the coast of Venezuela in September. Suddenly Congress is waking up to the real problem of President Trump's "shoot first" policy on boats in the Caribbean. Also today...more US bombs on Somalia - who are we at war with?

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Time Text
Why Fake News Spreads 00:11:34
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning into the Liberty Report.
With us today, we have Daniel McAdams, our co-host.
Daniel, good to see you.
Good morning, Dr. Paul.
How are you this morning?
Doing well.
Doing well.
Good.
We do want to have a follow-up, and I think this is maybe the third time we mentioned this subject, but every day there's something new, and it's never very encouraging.
It indicates that people in the government sometimes can't tell the truth.
We're trying to sort it out.
Anyway, it has to do with Hegseth.
You know, did he give the orders?
But they're ducking the responsibility.
The president didn't tell them to happen.
Hegseth didn't tell them.
And they have to pass the blame on to somebody else who ordered the second strike.
But I think they're missing the whole point here.
This is very important, of course.
Not the whole point.
But the big point for me is why in thunder was the first strike order?
You know, that to me is the big thing.
So the first strike was to go out and kill as many people as they could.
And even though they don't identify the people, they say, oh, they're hauling drugs.
And for some reason, I don't believe that because most of these vessels, there was one article out about the vessels, and most of it was hovering closer to Colombia and not close to the borders of Venezuela.
Anyway, the big argument is who gave the orders?
And I guess, in a way, it's important, but it's not as important as it is to me to know who gave the orders.
Oh, well, we're at war.
We decided the people did.
The people said to their congressman, you know, we're fearful.
We're fearful that, you know, somebody from Venezuela will invade us.
I think we should go to war.
Will you vote for war?
It didn't happen that way because it's just another old, undeclared, illegally immoral war that we have been pursuing in numerous occasions since 1945.
So that's where we are.
But now the technicality is who did the order to make sure you clean up the mess.
For them, the cleaning up the mess is, you didn't kill everybody.
And I guess they get some orders from the higher ups, but we don't know what.
But at least I think we can hypothesize.
And even it caught Rand's attention.
So we made, matter of fact, Rand called this week just to talk because Christmas is coming.
We did talk so much about this.
But we talk about that.
But he's up to speed on this.
And, of course, that's his job.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, Hegseth is in trouble now because of this.
And partially it's, you know, it's this whole thing, when you get in trouble, stop digging.
You're digging in a hole, stop digging.
Well, he's still digging.
And it looks bad for him.
And it's not just the Democrats trying to make political points on this.
You know, just the timeline is important, I think.
The first story broke, it started in the intercept with Nick Terse, I think, broke it.
And then the Washington Post broke it that it was Hegseth who said, kill them all.
And Hegseth, of course, immediately said, that's fake news, completely, totally fake news, never said it.
Then Trump said there wasn't even a second strike at all.
I don't know what you're talking about.
But then Hegseth said, well, I wasn't there.
I wasn't in the room at the time.
But then he also said, I watched it live.
And then he said, well, I only watched the first one live.
I didn't watch the second one.
But I completely support what happened.
I've got his back is what he said about the admiral who is now being forced to take the blame for all of this.
So it looks bad.
Certainly it doesn't look like this is a secretary of war who says the buck stops here, as you would normally think if you're a secretary, you should take responsibility for it.
No, he's pointing the finger at everyone but himself, and it's not a good look for him.
He's getting in more trouble.
Boy, that's for sure.
It's just another typical example of what happens when we get involved in something we shouldn't get involved in.
And this is what they're doing.
And it uses government sources.
You know, getting involved is one thing.
If you have a disagreement with what's going on in Venezuela, I would not have a prohibition.
Don't you dare go to Venezuela because you want to help so-and-so.
But that's not what's going on.
They don't even think that is ever going to be possible.
Matter of fact, there's probably a pretty strong prohibition if you wanted to voluntary, voluntarily go down and interfere and start supporting one group over the other.
But it's a mess.
And I'll tell you what, you're right.
Hegseth is getting himself into a deeper hole.
The question is, what's going to happen?
Can he get through with all this?
And, you know, there's problems in the administration.
This is another one.
I wonder if the tone will change from a top down, because the tone has not been good.
There's been some elections that indicate that maybe Trump is losing some steam.
And I liked the one complaint.
Can't remember exactly who made it.
It might have been a congresswoman.
It said, you know, you ought to stay at home.
We have problems.
Here, you're running away.
I think that was.
But Marjorie Taylor Greene, yeah, she did.
Yeah.
Why don't you stay in?
People are getting annoyed that you become a king of the world and involved in everything.
Making all these things.
You know, in the old days, I guess the one difference is in the old days, the CIA did it, and they were a little bit more thorough with their secrecy and nobody got to know about it.
This time, you know, it's sort of one of these things that our administrations likes to brag on and thinks that if you can sound tough and don't get pushed around, and you have to have a certain amount of it.
I just think you could describe toughness in different ways than it's being described now.
And remember, it was just a few weeks ago that Hegseth demanded that all the top brass of military, all the four services, come to a central meeting.
I think it was in Quantico in Virginia.
And he sort of berated them.
Remember, he said, oh, you guys are fat.
You're dumb.
You know, you need to shape up or ship out, all of this.
And you can see the look on the senior officer's face.
First of all, he was a relatively low ranking when he was in the military.
And he's talking to four stars in a way that seems disrespectful.
You can see the looks on their face.
They were not happy to be there.
They weren't happy to be talked to that way by Hegseth.
And so he's already off on the wrong foot.
But let's go to a couple of these clips now.
This is from Anti-War.
This is Dave DeCamp's write-up.
Heg Seth said he wasn't in the room when Admiral Bradley ordered the second strike.
He said, I watched the first strike live, Hegseth told reporters at a cabinet meeting.
As you can imagine, at the Department of War, we've got a lot of things to do.
So I didn't stick around for the hour, two hours, whatever, when all the sensitive site exploration digitally occurs.
So I moved on to my next meeting.
That does not sound like a very solid explanation, Dr. Paul.
And I think it'll be also easily very disproven.
And he'll be in bigger trouble.
But as you mentioned, Senator Paul did have some comments on this.
And I think these are some of the strongest comments that I've seen from the senator, probably since Fauci, when he was relentless on what Fauci was doing.
Very strong comments.
If we can play that first audio clip and listen to what Senator Paul had to say, you might want to put on your earpiece, Dr. Paul, and listen in on your son, actually.
It's a good comment.
In this sense, it looks to me like they're trying to pin the blame on somebody else and not them.
There's a very distinct statement that was said on Sunday.
Secretary Hegseth said he had no knowledge of this and it did not happen.
It was fake news.
It didn't happen.
And then the next day from the podium of the White House, they're saying it did happen.
So either he was lying to us on Sunday or he's incompetent and didn't know what had happened.
Do we think there's any chance that on Sunday the Secretary of the Defense did not know there had been a second strike?
In this sense.
Good point.
Do you think there's any way that on a Sunday he wouldn't know there's been a second strike?
He's either incompetent or he's lying.
Those are strong words.
Yeah, there's no doubt about it.
That I think the strongest impression that a lot of people will get is ineptness.
Yeah.
You know, not knowing what's happening.
Out of his league.
Because the president is somebody that knows what's going on and he seems to have a plan on how he manages his personnel.
But I guess that's the way you duck it.
And you know, Hegseth said that, oh, he wasn't in the room.
Well, where were you?
Yeah, where were you?
Yeah.
Good question.
Where were you?
What were you doing?
Oh, I was playing golf with him.
Yeah, yeah.
Where were you?
What were you doing?
Well, I have another clip here, an audio clip.
You just put that back in, maybe.
This is so it originally fake news.
None of this ever happened.
There wasn't a strike at all.
But then here's Hegseth.
This came up later where he actually said, I watched it live.
If you run that second audio video clip, if we can get that one going out, listen here, has Hegseth bragging that he did watch it.
So the president is sending a message to other cartels, right?
A very clear one.
I can tell you that was definitely not artificial intelligence.
I watched it live.
We knew exactly who was in that boat.
We knew exactly what they were doing.
And we knew exactly who they represented.
And that was Trende Aragua, a narco-terrorist organization designated by the United States, trying to poison our country with illicit drugs.
He knew exactly who was in the boat.
Why don't we have that information?
Exactly what they were doing.
And he watched it live.
So did you watch it live or was it fake news?
You know, it's hard to say.
Now, here, if you go to that next clip, here is Hegseth passing the buck.
The U.S. war chief said, if we can pull that, I know I've got one running back there.
U.S. War Chief said a couple of hours later, when he learned that Bradney, that's Admiral Bradley, who was the commander of the Joint Special Operations Command at the time, made the quote correct decision to ultimately sink the boat and eliminate the threat.
The threat of what?
Two guys clinging to a blown-up boat?
He added that it was, quote, the right call and that we have his back.
That's a way I think of deflecting blame, not accepting blame.
You know, this might make it even worse because of the people on those boats.
The truth is, we don't know a whole lot about them, but I bet you could find a few people there that are married and has kids.
Wiping Out Drug Deals 00:02:32
Yeah.
You know, something like that.
And if they knew every single thing about those people, oh, they were convinced that they have killed thousands and thousands of Americans by drugs coming in here.
Well, I have a different argument about that.
But He's sort of like he started off with, he's digging a hole for himself.
And we don't really know what he was doing, but he doesn't know who was in those boats.
No, he would tell us if he did.
And you know, someone said on X, I forget who it was.
I wish I could remember, but they made a good point, which is an obvious point.
As terrible as fentanyl and all these drugs are, people are voluntarily taking them.
It's a terrible thing to do.
It's a stupid thing to do.
It's a deadly thing to do.
But no one is forcing them down their throats or into their arms or however you take this narcotics.
People are choosing this.
So you can't say that you can't really call it the same kind of threat as if each one of these boats came in and literally shot 25,000 people, like Trump claims.
You know, people are making a conscious decision.
It's very sad if they're addicted to it, but they are making the decision to take the drugs.
Yeah, well, I make the point that prohibition, this very powerful prohibition, you protect and institute rules that you're going to wipe out the drug dealers.
Well, every time they wipe out some drug deal, the price goes up.
You know, there's a greater incentive to distribute it.
But they can't keep doing this because the people catch on.
If this were true and he's protecting lives, well, why don't they deal with sugar?
You know, people die by having too much sugar.
Sure.
And, oh, well, why don't they do it on alcohol?
They tried it.
They know how dumb it was.
And how many people died in moderation really came out?
Because I imagine a large majority of people who use alcohol probably use it modestly.
Yeah.
But they're making their own decisions.
And that's a good point about why they should go to war illegally and do all this killing and lying on something that's a failed policy to come and say we're going to stop the importation of these drugs.
Well, you know, the day they blow up one plant, they go to another one and they don't care because all they do is it pushes the price up and more incentives.
More profits.
Legal Minds Debate Warfare Ethics 00:04:59
Right.
But on the beer, there's a competition to bring the prices.
Yeah, exactly.
Well, there's here, you mentioned the legal part, and this is interesting.
If you go to that next clip, not the video, but the clip.
Now, I read a part from the law of war manual yesterday, but there is another part actually that's even more specific.
Go back, Juan, please.
So, Nick Turis, as I mentioned, is the intercept reporter who first broke it.
And he pointed out in the story published Tuesday, which is yesterday, that bombing survivors of a wrecked boat is against the Pentagon's own law of war manual.
Now, this is a I read one section.
This is actually another section I think that's even more damning, Dr. Paul.
This is a quote from the Pentagon's own law of war manual: persons who have been rendered unconscious or otherwise incapacitated by wounds, sickness, or shipwreck, such as they are no longer capable of fighting, are ore to combat out of action.
The guide reads: Persons who have been incapacitated by wounds, sickness, or shipwreck are in a helpless state, and it would be dishonorable and inhumane to make them the object of attack.
So, that completely undermines Hegset saying that this is perfectly fine to do.
Now, go to the next one.
This is a quote from Sarah Harrison, who was Associate General Counsel at the Pentagon's Office of General Counsel.
Here's a quote from her.
While the September 2nd strike seems uniquely depraved, every single strike taken against these boats by the DOD is a summary execution of criminal suspects, people who, even if tried in court, would never get the death penalty.
She continues, every single strike exposes those in the chain of command, key word, I think, key phrase, exposes those in the chain of command to the risk of criminal liability under murder statutes and international law prohibiting extrajudicial killings.
And that's a long way of saying what you've said many times.
It's not just a double tap, it's the action of blowing up these boats in the first place.
Why do they do it?
But you know, just think of how many bombs we have dropped.
We're going to talk about another country receiving some of our bombs.
But they have so many, there are so many examples of how freely we just drop bombs on people.
So every case in there is equivalent to the outrage that we're expressing now.
But this one got into the news, and some people, they start seeing two people hanging on a railing, and you don't know whether they were absolutely innocent.
They don't know anything about them.
And they come across as heroes.
Unfortunately, the biggest problem is they gain the political points on this.
Too many people say, that's what we need.
We need tough people.
We need tough people.
Senators might even get to the floor and say, you know, kill them all.
You know, it's very disturbing.
But the tide is turning, I think, and it's starting to become a liability.
And I'm glad to hear that.
But let's turn to a great legal mind to analyze this.
We had a couple of pieces of analysis here, but Judge Napolitano, our great friend, who is also the legal judicial expert for Newsmax, which is a conservative station, a very conservative station.
Now, if that third video clip is available, he gave his analysis as to what he thinks, as to what he thinks about these killings of these people on the boats.
Let's hear the judge.
Gives me no pleasure to say what I'm about to say because I worked with Pete Hegseth for seven or eight years at Fox News.
This is an act of a war crime, ordering survivors who the law requires be rescued instead to be murdered.
There's absolutely no legal basis for it.
Everybody along the line who did it, from the Secretary of Defense to the Admiral to the people who actually pulled the trigger, should be prosecuted for a war crime for killing these two people.
And who would gives me no pleasure to say what Hegeth is because I work with Pete Hegseth should be prosecuted for war crimes?
As Senator Paul said, if he didn't know, then he's incompetent.
He should have known.
That is absolutely true because it would be total ineptness if they're supposed to know that.
But that's what they're admitting because they're not.
I mean, oh, yeah, we'll kill people like that.
We really didn't do it.
Somebody else gave the order.
But they will dock the responsibility.
But I think I can't help always going back to the basic principle that's buried in our Constitution that would prevent things like this.
Why Some Congress Members Stand Up 00:04:21
And yet instead, it continues.
But you sort of hinted toward the fact that things are improving in some ways because there are members of Congress.
And when the members of Congress stand up against their leadership on issues like this, this to me is a good sign because, yes, they have instincts, but those instincts are usually fed by their constituents, which means if I say this, yeah, I do it, I will, but it's probably very risky.
But I think when you see these members of Congress starting to speak out, and there are some, there's some of these proposals are bipartisan, and I think that's another good sign to restrain this type of activity.
Another possible positive unintended consequence could be a slowdown in the momentum of Trump's stated interest in attacking Venezuela.
It's going to, if it stalls right here on the issue of these boats, he doesn't have the momentum that he needs.
He needs to convince the American people that this is the right thing to do.
And as of now, the last poll I saw, only about 20% said they were convinced that we need to attack Venezuela.
So he hasn't done a good job.
This is going to make people pause and think even more.
But nevertheless, the president seems very determined.
Go to this next clip now.
This is from Zero Hedge.
Maduro could be exiled to Qatar as Trump warns that land strikes on Venezuela are coming very soon.
The New York Post is reporting that the White House offered Maduro to be exiled in Qatar where he can live his days out in luxury.
And if not, he is determined, the president says, to launch strikes and attacks, even on the ground in Venezuela.
You know, the other thing is, do you think these people really trust each other?
You know, I think that we have offered that to many, that they get killed before that happens.
But it's not so much that we can identify these positions, and there's a way of explaining how it gets started and what we should have done, but we still have a mess out there.
And it's still so disturbing.
But I think that information is what the people need because a lot of average people out there, they love Trump.
They're not going to ever, maybe not ever, because matter of fact, it is softening.
And I don't look at these details on this, but I think softening support of anybody, if it has to do with a complaint about their politics and that they're using authoritarianism rather than liberty as a solution or a problem, that does annoy me.
I would say, actually, if you love Trump, you should be one of the ones discouraging from making what's going to be a very, very bad move because of the attack on Venezuela.
It will destroy his presidency and it will be an absolute quagmire.
If you love Trump, you should be speaking out against this.
This is not what we signed up for, Mr. President.
We love you, but you've got to fix what's happening in the U.S. first.
That's a big issue.
Now, the other thing about this attack, if it happens, we've talked about it over and over.
I mean, this is not going to be a cakewalk.
And in fact, if you skip that next article and go to the following one, the New York Times, this is actually an interesting article to read.
It came out a few days ago.
But the U.S. ran a war game on ousting Maduro.
Venezuela fell into chaos.
Now, that shouldn't surprise anyone who actually watches regime changes.
They never end well.
They always end badly.
But so they do know under the first Trump term that when they tried this, it was a disaster.
And so they know it's going to be a disaster.
And I will say one thing, Dr. Paul.
There have been several stories in the media that Maduro has asked To not be subject to prosecution, immunity, amnesty, if he does go.
I think all of these stories are CIA propaganda.
Bombing Somalia: 102nd Time 00:07:36
I don't believe that it's true that he's asked for anything.
I think these are planted in the press to give the impression in Venezuela that the president is looking for a way out.
We see this, we've seen it with, we saw it with Assad before it actually happened.
We've seen it with Gaddafi.
They're always just begging for a way out.
It's never really true.
I think these are planted stories.
They're hoping that Maduro will just walk away so Trump can say, see, I won, pull the ships back.
I solved another war.
It's my 85th war that I've solved, and I'm the greatest president in history.
That's what they're hoping for.
I don't think it's going to happen.
And you think the CIA would participate in such activities?
It's terrible to admit it.
We had one more little item that we wanted to talk about.
Yeah, yes.
And that is related indirectly, philosophically, as much as anything, because I already talked about the nonsense of just going around willy-nilly and bombing countries just to see how many people survive that we can go after after that.
But this is again from our friend Dave de Camp.
And he brought to attention.
Now, the reason why I pulled this out is we've known about this.
We see little clips about it, but I think it's sort of going unnoticed and talked about because there's so much other junk going around.
But the title is U.S. Bomb Somalia for the 102nd time this year.
They break all records.
We've been bombing them for a long time, but that's a new record.
So that to me, and then that's a complicated set of politics there.
And, you know, the al-Shabaab is involved, and that's why we're over there.
We wanted to get our good guy in there, so we keep bombing away, which does absolutely no good.
But that tells us, though, that this is persistent.
What was the one statement that we're not going to get into another war?
Yes, and this is not a forever war.
Trust us.
No, no.
We're cautious about that.
No 20-year wars anymore.
But 15, that's not too bad.
Yeah, we haven't.
We promised to quit this no-win war in 15 years.
Yeah, exactly.
So you can actually put it up: U.S. bombs Somalia for the 102nd time.
This is a record that Trump has shattered for airstrikes in one year.
It was 63 during his first term in 2019.
But he's broken that record now 102nd time.
The other irony about this whole thing, Dr. Paul, well, two things.
First of all, there's absolutely no way in any way, shape, or form that Somalia is a threat to the U.S. What happens in the internal politics of Somalia means nothing to the U.S. whatsoever.
So there's no reason to be bombing it at all.
But another irony is that the U.S. claims that it has to bomb Somalia because it has to take out ISIS.
ISIS is bad.
We've got to bomb.
Well, the president just welcomed the former head of ISIS in Syria to the White House.
He welcomed ISIS into the White House.
That's fine, but we've got to bomb ISIS in Somalia.
It makes no sense.
Maybe that was just propaganda.
He showed it.
He's open-minded.
He's open-minded.
You know, it's just so difficult to comprehend how people can take these positions.
But I don't think they know the word consistency.
I don't think it means anything to them.
But, you know, the time I spent in politics, I found out that it was of value.
No, it doesn't guarantee that you're going to become a get a promotion and earn a lot of money or what rewards are.
But there is a psychological reward that that's probably the compliment that I, you know, I have to admit, I enjoy.
They said, well, we like you because you're consistent.
And there are people out there.
I think, and we talked a little bit about that the other hypocrisy.
When the hypocrisy is blatant, I don't think the large majority likes that because then you can't trust them on what they're telling us.
Yeah, their position changes depending on who's writing the checks, who's twisting their arms.
And they knew that that would never work with you.
And that's why they appreciated that and still do.
I'm going to close out and thank everyone for watching the show.
Please hit that like button or thumbs up wherever you're watching the show.
And please pass the show around if you can to help us get more exposure.
Obviously, you know, criticizing the administration, you know, causes people to be upset with us.
We don't dislike Trump.
We wish he would do the right thing.
The right thing is easy.
Just don't do it.
Don't bomb Venezuela.
Don't bomb Somalia.
You know, pull out.
And as Marjorie Taylor Green said, stay here at home and fix the things at home.
That's what we need to do.
That's what we voted for.
So anyway, thank you very much for watching the show.
Over to you, Dr. Paul.
Very good.
And, you know, today we talked a little bit about influence on an administration and whether or not they'll change their position.
And I think there's reasons to be optimistic, even though we talk and tell people what's going on.
It sounds terrible.
But, you know, the system in a way works.
And I use the word carefully.
You know, the democracy and liberty is a different thing.
It's a democracy in the marketplace.
It's good.
The supply and demand let the people decide.
And even under our circumstances that we have today, when the people speak out, there is a change of attitude.
But a lot of mess goes on and a lot of money spent.
And we have all these difficult.
But the money that there is an influence when this can't cause people to change their mind and change their position.
And I think that's what we're witnessing now.
And I do mention once again the advice that somebody gave to Trump is, you know, our numbers are going down and you better pay attention because it's giving us a tough time getting reelected.
And the advice I would like to give you, this is somebody that was talking about Trump and to Trump theoretically, is you should stay at home more.
Be the president of the United States, not be by the authoritarian for the world.
And that's pretty good advice.
So I think we're going to see in the next week, two or three, but if the administration gets more aggressive, I'll be discouraged about that.
Because I think the issue of defending liberty is a great issue.
I think the people, if they really understand it, most people want to be free.
They don't want people telling them everything that they can do.
The only thing is, is they're frightened that our standard of living will go down if we have more freedom.
And yet there is proof.
History has shown that the freer a country is, the wealthier the country is, and the more peace there is.
That's the goal that we ought to have.
I want to thank everybody for tuning in today to the Liberty Report.
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