All Episodes
Previous Next
Jan. 7, 2026 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
14:07
Raising The Stakes US Seizes RUSSIA Flagged Tanker!

The US Coast Guard has boarded and seized a Russian-flagged tanker in the north Atlantic, claiming the right to interdict any shipping contrary to US sanctions. Will Russia respond?

|

Time Text
Russian Law Enforcement? 00:09:08
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to 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 fine, thank you.
Today, we want to start off with somebody or something that is ongoing.
It just started, and it's news, something that shouldn't surprise anybody.
There is a little bit of blowback from the activity so far of capturing a leader in one company, country, and moving forward.
Today, the headline on Zero Hedge is pretty significant and may well have a big effect on what's going to be going on with Venezuela.
U.S. seizes Russian flag tanker in the North Atlantic.
And, well, what did they do?
What have they done?
Have they murdered people, dropped bombs on one of our ships or something?
Oh, no.
It turns out that we've had written up some regulations and sanctions and told people what they could do and couldn't do.
And they didn't follow our regulations.
So they're on the bad guys' list.
And this justifies us going in there and risking a huge war.
But this is very disturbing because it may end tomorrow, the next day or so, and everybody will be settled down.
I don't think so, though, because I think that we create the problems.
This whole thing is, it isn't even international law.
They don't even pretend to hide behind anything other than, oh, there's these sanctions and we have these regulations and they didn't listen to us.
And, you know, even the people that don't like Maduro, you know, also think about the rule of law and they don't want to do harm in overstepping in what they consider something that doesn't deserve quite the effort of here of taking a Russian flag tanker over.
I mean, what if they retaliate?
They're capable of it.
Let's hope that they can settle it in a better fashion than that.
Yeah, it is a big deal, and I think it's an escalation.
If you put that first clip up, and you know, this is the thing that the MAGA people are calling it the Don Rowe Doctrine as a take on the Monroe Doctrine, which if you actually look at RonPaulInstitute.org today, we have an article up by Larry Johnson pointing out that these people completely misunderstand what the Monroe Doctrine was.
It was a doctrine of non-intervention, not intervention.
That's what it was all about.
People completely misunderstand.
Keep it up there, please.
Completely misunderstand that.
So, what happened today is that the U.S., no, they didn't snatch Venezuela that can't really retaliate against the U.S.
They didn't snatch a ship from Panama or from Guyana or something.
No, they snatched a Russian-flagged oil tanker, the Marinera, and in the North Atlantic near Iceland.
That is a serious escalation.
If you go to the next one, this is exactly what you're saying, Dr. Paul, and this is the danger here.
The U.S. European Command confirmed on X that the Department of Justice and Department of Homeland Security, in coordination with the Department of Defense, snagged the Russian flag tanker.
And here's the thing: for violating U.S. sanctions.
So, the idea, Dr. Paul, is that the U.S. president can declare sanctions on some other country or some other entity, and the rest of the world must follow those dictates, or we will seize your stuff.
Now, that's one thing when you do it again to a small country that can't fight back, but obviously, Russia can fight back, and it can be a big escalation.
So the big question is what else will happen on this?
There's going to be a lot of unhappiness and that will make the conditions very difficult to handle.
And I think that this incident is not going to go away easily.
Yeah, it's not.
And you can see if you go one ahead, you can see the photo of the Coast Guard ship staring down the Marinera just before boarding.
And there is some video on X of the helicopters where you see the U.S. military personnel going down.
If you go to the next one, you see the location just south of Iceland where the boat where the tanker was seized.
And so this is in international water, obviously.
This airborne operation to seize the tanker Marinera is being supported by U.S. Air Force Boeing KC-135T starter tanker, refueling aircraft, U.S. Air Force Boeing P-8A Poseidon patrol craft, and a British Boeing Poseidon MRA-1 operating nearby in an entire chain of U.S. special mission aircraft.
So obviously they're all coordinating this.
Now, if you go to the next one, here is a statement of the U.S. of the Russian Ministry of Transport.
They said, on December 24th, the vessel Marinera was granted temporary permission to sail under the state flag of the Russian Federation, issued in accordance with the Russian legislation and the norms of international law.
Today, at around 1500 Moscow time, in the open seas beyond the territorial waters of any state, U.S. naval forces boarded the vessel.
Communication with the ship was subsequently lost.
In accordance with the provisions of the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, the high seas are governed by the principle of freedom of navigation, and no state has the right to use force against vessels duly registered under the jurisdiction of other states.
In other words, they point out that this is a blatantly illegal operation.
You know, there's several things going on here.
First, you could question the authority.
Where do they get the authority to do that?
And we've alluded to that already.
And we just claim that we have this power and power speaks and people roll over.
And things are going their way of the interventionists and the ones that want to take over because on the short run, they can justify and say, oh, it looks like people are very happy with us stealing all this stuff and taking over a country.
What are they doing?
They say, don't do it.
Don't do it.
They're looking for the next three countries to they want to take one that really, really just bothers me to know and they say, we need Greenland to defend this country.
I mean, that's so much nonsense.
They're just looking for a fight.
And they don't explain where the authority come from.
But what about where are they going to get the money?
Oh, what is it?
What'd they do in the Middle East?
No problems when we asked the question.
We've got all that oil and he's going to pay for all these bills.
And then what about Afghanistan?
Same thing.
Well, we saw how the Middle East ended and we saw how it ended in Afghanistan.
Yeah, trillions of dollars.
And the idea that if the oil companies make these profits from going in, somehow it's going to go down to the American people.
I didn't realize that the U.S. oil companies were welfare organizations for the American people.
This is a big issue.
We'll see what happens.
I mean, it's one thing to go in and snatch Maduro, but it's a completely other thing to start snatching Russian oil tankers.
So it's a very, very different thing.
You know, when this happened to Iran a while ago, recently, I think the last couple years, the U.S. snatched an Iranian tanker.
Well, the Iranians turned around and snatched a U.S. tanker.
And so that may well be what the Russians do.
Otherwise, they show themselves to be very weak.
But I think one of the architects of this idea that we can do whatever we want, if you go to the next one, this is the White House deputy chief of staff, a very dangerous person, Stephen Miller.
He said the U.S. will permit that word permit.
The U.S. will permit maritime energy transport through Venezuela if consistent with U.S. law.
So this idea now that they're pointing out is that our law is the world's law.
In other words, we are the global police.
The exact same, the exact thing that they campaigned against.
Police state.
The police state.
The international police state that we're running now.
And, you know, they throw out threats.
And the threats then become reality because they follow up and they have to have another incident or the people will say, hey, they're not doing anything.
Graham On Trump's Regime Change Claims 00:03:33
So something's going to happen to perpetuate this and promote it so that people come to accept it.
And there's a lot of people who love this type of activity.
We're strong.
We're patriotic.
We're for the military and all that.
Right.
Yeah.
Like right after the Iraq War II, 1903.
Everyone is all for it until Americans start dying.
And then everyone forgets they were for it.
Well, the second thing we want to briefly talk about is a couple of truth bombs thrown out there by Senator Rand Paul.
And this was in the Hill today, I think it is.
Senator Paul Lindsey Graham was behind Trump's decision to topple Maduro.
Now, it's no secret that Senator Paul is no fan of Lindsey Graham.
There was a time when President Trump was hanging out with people like Rand Paul and Thomas Massey.
Now his new BFF is Lindsey Graham, and you can see what's happened.
Now go to the next one.
Conservative Senator Rand Paul from Kentucky on Monday pointed the finger directly at his colleague Senator Graham as a primary instigator behind President Trump's mission to send U.S. special operators into Caracas.
Paul lamented what he sees as a reversal from Trump's previous staunch opposition to nation building and said Graham was a major factor in changing the president's thinking.
Go to the next one.
Here's what Senator Paul said.
This is Lindsey Graham.
Lindsey Graham has gotten to the president who expressed, I saw there's like 20 clips of Trump saying he's not for regime change and how regime change always goes wrong.
Somehow they've convinced him that it's different if it's in our hemisphere.
As Paul said, lamenting the growing influence of hawkish Republicans such as Graham.
So Graham is in there.
Graham is whispering like worm tongue in President Trump's ear.
That doesn't let President Trump off a hook.
He's a grown man.
But the fact is, that's what's happening.
Yes, and they think that they can get away with this.
And the more they play tricks, I think the more credibility that they lose.
But, you know, when I think of Graham, I think of Lord Acton.
Yeah, yeah.
Lord Acton, because there is this temptation of people in power and politics, and they all assume a certain role and they sort of gloat in power.
You know, I've helped members of Congress get into Congress because they spoke a good game.
But as soon as they're in, a little taste of power.
Oh, it's necessary for me to do this and not hesitate.
And I can't follow all those promises I made.
Yep.
But Acton said power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Don't you think Graham sort of fits into that?
He had a little bit of power, and it was a nuisance to us.
But now he's really in a powerful position.
And people, he'd probably do well on the polls right now.
I don't think anybody's running against him in the Senate.
Yeah, but well, not among young people, I don't think.
Yeah, that's great.
But here's how unhinged he is, right?
He is feeling his oaths.
Now, if you saw him on that Air Force One clip a couple days ago, he was like a little girl.
He was giddy and he was like, he couldn't believe how wonderful it is.
Well, here's how unhinged.
Let's get, let's listen to Senator Graham.
Here's what he was saying.
Now, he's not done with Venezuela.
He wants to go to Colombia.
He wants to go to Cuba.
And here's what else he wants.
Unhinged Power Play 00:01:23
If we can find that.
Yeah, let's listen to Lindsey Graham here.
Donald J. Trump is not Barack Obama.
He has your back.
And to the Ayatoz, you need to understand, if you keep killing your people who are demanding a better life, Donald J. Trump is going to kill you.
Change is coming to Iran.
It'll be the biggest change in the history of the Mideast to get rid of this Nazi regime.
To the people of Iran, help is on the way.
Unbelievable.
Trump is going to kill you, the leaders of a foreign country.
And the other thing is, and you point out rightly that maybe the young people don't go along with it, but there's a lot of other people who do, and they like to hear this stuff.
So that's a real problem.
That's certainly not MAGA, that's for sure.
Well, I'm going to close out if you put that last clip on.
Just remind everyone that we've got a few days' grace period now to raise that additional money.
We started with $100,000 donated.
Now we're just about $15,000 and we've got until the 19th.
So if you can make a tax-deductible donation to bring up our number a little bit so we can get that matching fund, we would be enormously appreciative.
There is a link in today's description.
And I want to thank you for watching today's program.
Over to you, Dr. Paul.
Very good.
And I want to make sure our viewers understand how much we appreciate their help and support.
Export Selection