‘WHY Wage Their War For Them?’ Trump Strikes Venezuela Boats

0:01This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required, compatibility and availability varies 18+. They want regime change in Venezuela, But I don't understand why the United States would have to wage their war for them.

0:33And I'm most interested in chasing the money and the organizations now that are building apartments in Medellin and buying apartment buildings in Miami. Why are migrants coming to our shores? It's because of the coup program that virtual ambassador and coup manager Jimmy Story oversaw, which brought Venezuela's economy to its knees by 2020, reversing all the gains they had made when Hugo Chavez slashed extreme poverty by 50%. Well, apparently I forgot to wear my tinfoil hat for the panel today.

1:13Piers Morgan:At least 80 people have been killed in 21 separate US strikes on Venezuelan boats, most recent of which came only this weekend. The White House says they're trafficking drugs to the United States, although we only have their word for that. And whatever the purpose of the strikes, it's very clear that something big is happening. The US has sent the world's biggest aircraft carrier to the Caribbean Sea, where it joins a whole fleet of warships in the biggest military build-up there for almost 40 years. Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro has urged Trump to change course and channel John Lennon instead.

1:45Peace, peace, peace. Hacer todo por la paz. Como decía John Lennon, ¿no?

2:08Piers Morgan:What many of Trump supporters can't imagine is how attacking Venezuela can possibly be reconciled with America first. And critics on both sides worry about the long precedent of U.S. presidents using war as a distraction. So is the U.S. really heading for war? Joining me to discuss all this is Mike Baker, the former CIA operative, host of the President's Daily Brief. Ambassador James Storey, the former U.S. ambassador to Venezuela. Ryan Grimm, the drop site co-founder and co-host of Breaking Points. And Max Bumenthal, the editor of The Grey Zone. Welcome to all of you. Mike Baker, I want to start with a clip of Donald Trump talking on Air Force One on Sunday night.

2:46On Venezuela, sir, you've had a lot of meetings on Venezuela. I know you can't tell us what your next steps will be, but can we say, have you made up your mind on what you'd like to do as far as action? I sort of have made up my mind. I can't tell you what it would be, but I sort of made up my mind. What did you say to some of your supporters who might not be excited about another foreign campaign? We'll see what happens. I mean, I can't tell you what it is, but we've made a lot of progress with that as well in terms of stopping drugs from pouring.

3:18Piers Morgan:But to go with that, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio issued a statement on Sunday announcing that the US intends to consider the group Cartel de los Soles, a foreign terrorist organisation from November 24. The US alleges the group is led by the Venezuelan president Maduro. So, Mike Baker, what do you make of this? What is happening here, both in the attacks on these boats, which the administration says are all drug smuggling, and also the wider buildup of the military, which is pointing to an altogether more serious military engagement with Venezuela? Yeah, there's a lot of elements here. There's a lot of moving parts.

4:03But I think what we're seeing is a couple of things happening at the same time. One, obviously, they've stepped up their counter-narcotics operations. I can't speak to the legality of all of this, the legal issues that surround knocking these vessels out of the water and killing over 80 people. From an operational perspective, you can talk about the credibility of the intel. From my perspective, I don't have insight on that, so it's speculation. But I would like to see, I can tell you, I would like to see a little bit more transparency to the degree that you can from the administration to say these have been the targets.

4:36This is why we are going after them specifically, rather than just some blanket statement saying they're narco traffickers. They were on a narco trafficking route, whatever it may be. So I think that's a real problem for them. But the buildup that's out there, if you're just looking at a counter-narcotics operation, it doesn't make any sense. It's outsized, right? So having a carrier strike group out there, along with all the other support assets and vessels that are there, that doesn't make sense from just a pure counter-narcotics operational perspective. So I would look at that then and say, well, there's another track here, which is the effort to influence Maduro to move out of the way.

5:18And again, it's speculation as to whether they intend to get involved in a kinetic effort on the ground inside Venezuela to actually affect regime change, or whether they're saying, look, We think we can exert enough pressure to create change internally. Maduro either deciding to step down, I don't think that's going to happen, or his closest advisers or the senior military telling him that's going to have to happen.

5:42Piers Morgan:OK, Ryan Grimm, you posted cartel de los souls is the most obvious CIA made-up name for a cartel ever. No cartel names itself like that. This is a Langley creation. So finding a leader shouldn't be hard. Explain what you mean. So the CIA is based in Langley. So that's what I mean. If I was being a little obscure there, if they want to find out who's responsible for creating this cartel, just pull out your Waze or your GPS and find your way out to CIA headquarters. Whereas I think Max could probably tell you more about the specific details of how this cartel came about. But it was effectively this like bizarre creation where like you've got the Defense Department, the CIA involved in some, you know, counter.

6:28You know, they're they're trying to basically overthrow a government and they need some like narco terrorists for whatever play they're using. And so they kind of fabricate this cartel of the sun and call it cartel. So it's like, what are you what are you even doing? No, this is not even serious. Like, give us, like, at least something that is, like, plausible that we can cling to. Like, what happened to the days where, like, okay, maybe Saddam Hussein at one point did have weapons of mass destruction. He didn't then, but at least, like, it's plausible. Like, there's so little respect for the American people now that when they're trying to march them into war, they don't even give them something that they can even pretend to believe.

7:10So what do you think they really want to do here? Well, I think the Rubio wing, and I think we need to distinguish between President Trump and Rubio in this case. Rubio has been boxed out of Ukraine, has been boxed out of Gaza. So he's got his little Caribbean sandbox here. And what he is doing is playing out the fantasies of the Cuban right over the last couple of decades. And they want regime change in Venezuela. And they think that that'll have the knock-on effect of creating regime change back in Cuba. That's fine if the Cuban right wants to do that, but I don't understand why the United States would have to wage their war for them.

7:48The same kind of pressure was applied to President Obama when it came to Libya. And unfortunately for us, for Libya, for the region, Obama capitulated to that. And we now have this disastrous situation that the entire world is living with. I think Trump is aware that this kind of attempt to just decapitate a regime is likely to lead to another Libya situation. And so far, I think Trump actually deserves credit for standing up to this war hawk wing. And in fact, if he does stand them down and resist a war, I'd almost say you would give him credit for stopping a war. because to have a hawkish element, you know, this committed to regime change and to be able to stop that, even as president, is not that simple.

8:32Piers Morgan:Ambassador Story, I don't think politically that Trump is in a great place right now with his base because of the Epstein scandal, because of the Israel mass war, to go and try and affect regime change in a place like Venezuela. I just think never mind the sort of military operational side or even the ethics of it, just from a purely political perspective. It would seem to me to be an entirely self-harming act, wouldn't it? Yes. And I think Trump understands. Sorry, sorry. That was actually. Sorry, Ryan. That was for Ambassador Story. Well, I'd be delighted if you wanted to answer the part of the Epstein files, to be honest with you.

9:13I'd rather say that I'd like to go back to why, what's the causes belly here, what do we actually know to be the case. And this isn't an invention that the Coctel de los Soles exists. You can talk to Cleaver Akala, who's in jail. You can talk to Pollo Carvajal, who's in jail. You can talk to the nephews, Cecilia Flores, who's married to Maduro, who were in jail. this is a criminal group masquerading as a government, and regime change already took place. It took place in July of last year when there was a vote overwhelmingly against Maduro by the Venezuelan people themselves. So does the president, what is the president's intentions?

9:57Certainly, our first panelist today said that this is much more than counter-mercotics. That's correct. There's pressure on the Maduro regime, on the dictatorship. It's additional pressure that that which the Venezuelan people gave when they again, they voted overwhelmingly to get him out of office last year. Now, where we go from here was the next step that remains to be seen. But the president certainly has a number of options at his disposal.

10:22Piers Morgan:But you don't believe it's purely a war on drugs. Absolutely not. Absolutely not. I ran counter-narcotics in Colombia for two years. I ran counter-narcotics in the Western Hemisphere for three, I can tell you that these are the types of resources in military hardware that are frankly a little heavy-handed when it comes to counter-narcotics. Generally speaking, we use white hulls, those are Coast Guard vessels, we judicialize the cases, and frankly, the kind of unilateral action we're taking in the region will have knock-on effects, negative knock-on effects, undermining intelligence sharing across the region with our partners.

11:03Out of Key West Florida, we have Joint Interagency Task Force South, and that has 20 liaison officers from the region as well as from the UK, France, and the Netherlands. The intel sharing will dry up, and I'm most interested in chasing the money in the organizations now that are building apartments in medellin and buying apartment buildings in miami and i think that uh going at that judicialized route gives us more intelligence helps assure our regional relationships and is a better approach um certainly this will have an impact on drug trafficking but drug traffickers are transnational they don't pay attention to borders they also aren't democratic and they don't work by committee so they will change their route and before i go to max i just wanted to ask

11:50Piers Morgan:you on the legality of these attacks on the boats, which the administration say are drug smugglers. They're not getting any prior approval from Congress for this. They're not providing much information in terms of what evidence they've had to justify what they've done. In your opinion, is what is happening here with these boats legal? Listen, I think that if you look at going after foreign terrorist organizations, as we did under many of the prior administrations, going back to Bush, you can look at Obama and you can look at Clinton. There was a methodology by which targets were assessed and went through a preview process and then the president had the ultimate decision.

12:33I don't know what the process is here. What I can tell you is what the impacts will be for our cooperation regionally. And that's a negative impact on our cooperation. So certainly the Congress has a role to play with AUMF, the Authorised Use of Military Force. To the extent that Congress is back in session and wants to take up this issue, they may indeed need to do so.

12:58Piers Morgan:OK, Max Blumenthal, a lot to unpack here, obviously. First of all, on that point about the attacks on these boats, there'll be a lot of Americans who'll say, well, if they are drug smugglers, happy days. Why should we care? There are not a lot of Americans who believe that only 29 percent of Americans, according to a recent Reuters Ipsos poll, support these murderous attacks on supposed drug boats without due process that have killed citizens of Trinidad and Tobago, as well as Colombian citizens and cause British government to suspend intelligence cooperation as the virtual ambassador James Story just acknowledged.

13:40This is all based, as Ryan pointed out, on a series of WMD-level lies that haven't even been explained to the American public, which is why only 21 percent of the American public, according to that poll, supports this criminal regime change war in the making, which will negatively affect them. That's what Story meant when he called, when he referred to knock-on effects, meaning more mass migration. The big lie of this war is the Cartel of the Suns. As Ryan said, the Cartel of the Suns was literally created by the CIA, also known as the Cocaine Import Agency, to ship 22 tons of drugs into the United States in the early 90s through its main point of contact in the pre-Chavez Venezuelan National Guard, General Ramon Guillen-Davilla.

14:28And he wore a patch on his arm that was a sun. And so they just called it the Cartel of the Suns as cover, and they thought that they would use these. This was also during the 80s under Reagan. They thought they would use these drug shipments to gain intelligence on drug traffickers in the U.S. It wound up poisoning our own society. The CIA, for doing that, should be classified as a narco-terrorist organization. Then there's Tren de Aragua, the supposed gang that Nicolas Maduro has said to control by the Trump administration. That's another WMD-level lie that U.S. intelligence exposed in a declassified April report from this year.

15:07And you know what happened? Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard came out and fired, presided over the firing of the two officials who exposed the lie that Maduro controls TDA and is invading the United States. Why are migrants coming to our shores? It's because of the coup program, the regime change program, that virtual ambassador and coup manager Jimmy Story and other U.S. foreign policy apparatchiks oversaw, which brought Venezuela's economy to its knees by 2020, reversing all the gains they had made when Hugo Chavez slashed extreme poverty by 50 percent. This caused mass migration, and it's not just according to me, it's according to Thomas Shannon, who was undersecretary for the State Department in Donald Trump's administration, who said U.S.

15:56sanctions reduced Venezuela's economy to dust. He told this to the Washington Post, and it caused out-migration. So if Donald Trump is going to fall into Marco Rubio's selfish Gusano games, we are going to see another massive wave of migration to the U.S.-Mexico border. And whether you're on the right or the left, you do not want that. And you cannot fall for another WMD series of lies that will produce a Libya in the Western Hemisphere.

16:25Piers Morgan:OK, Mike Baker, your response to that? Well, apparently I forgot to wear my tinfoil hat for the panel today. There's nothing I can say that's going to change Max or Ryan's position. I've talked with folks like this before who, you know, great. I don't know where to go with that. I would say that, you know, from my perspective. What do you know about with the CIA? The problem here is, as is usual, is a lack of transparency. And whether it's from the Trump administration or previous administration, I am a big proponent of transparency here on something like this. This is a serious matter, right?

17:10I'm also a big proponent of counter-narcotics operations. I spent a lot of time in the drug wars. And one thing that I think we need to insist on from the current administration is more explanation, right? I'm not comfortable saying with a blanket authority that, yeah, sure, we're going to trust the credibility of the intel on these various targets. I'm not talking about legality. I'm not talking about – I'm not going to go into the things that Max and Ryan are talking about because from my perspective, that just lends it credibility if I try to refute that. It's like, when was the last time you beat your wife, Senator?

17:49So I think I would argue that there's two things happening here. They're operating on a dual track. They are going after narcotics. This ambassador is absolutely correct. Columbia has already shut down intel sharing. This will have ramifications that I don't think the State Department or the White House understand. And I think at the same time, they are pressuring. There's no doubt about it. Look, are they after regime change? Sure. That should not be a goal here. I think if we can pressure internally the advisors around Maduro to say, it's time for you to step down, that would, in fact, I don't know whether Max and Ryan agree with me, but a change in government in Venezuela, I'm not saying regime change, I'm just saying if Maduro stepped down, that would be a wonderful thing for the Venezuelan people, I think, unless they're big proponents of the form of socialism that Maduro is pushing.

18:48Anyway, So that's all I get.

18:51Piers Morgan:I'm back to the story. Obviously, the United States doesn't recognise Maduro as the president after the outcome of that last election in 2024. It's been dismissed widely internationally as well and by the opposition in Venezuela. The opposition leader in Venezuela just got the Nobel Peace Prize, which many think was not a coincidence. That election is deemed to have been neither free nor fair, and they believe the opposition party won the election, but the Maduro government stole it. So you have that as the backdrop to the legitimacy of the Maduro election. But history also shows us that when the United States tries to enforce regime change anywhere in the world, it's rarely anything but a bit of a mess, often with extremely bad repercussions.

19:42Piers Morgan:You know, is it not better? I mean, Trump's instincts have always been America first, fewer foreign wars, don't go and rattle hornet's nests. He's got the Israel-Hamas war, which has thankfully now reached a point of ceasefire at the moment. He's getting nowhere in Ukraine. I just don't think that his instincts will be telling him that going in there mob-handed to affect regime change would be anything but a potential disaster, maybe not militarily, but politically for him. Well, I want to kind of turn your, you asked like five questions in one here, and I want to try to pull it apart a little bit without going after the ad hominem attacks by one of the other panelists.

20:24I think we need to recognize a couple of things here. One, this is a criminal group masquerading as a government, without a doubt. Two, this is a group of people, Maduro and company, who have crimes against humanity charges against them in the ICC. They have narcotics trafficking indictments in the United States. They are responsible for the mass migration, which started in 2017, before the oil sanctions began to be even instituted. Therefore, 9 million people have already fled that country because they're fleeing torture, dictatorship, and death. What happened to Captain Acosta Revelo? What happened to General Baduel?

21:07What happened to Fernando Alban? And what we have, and we have people who continue to make excuses for a murderous regime because they don't like the politics of the current administration in the United States. Now, the president has a number of options. I do not believe that Maduro leaving Venezuela will end in Haiti or Libya or Iraq. That's simply not true. Now, Maduro likes to talk about Afghanistan and Vietnam, and it will be, we're going to enter this terrible moment. It's not true. And it's not true because they have the resources to rebuild their country. They're not on the same level as sectarian or ideological divide.

21:44Heck, most of the people, from the leadership of the opposition to the leadership of the Maduro regime, they went to college together. They're first cousins. They know each other. This is a country that's set to be, once it regains its democracy, really an economic engine for the whole region. I have a much more optimistic view of the ability of the Venezuelan people to create a transitional government, fix the institutions that have been destroyed and become a normal part of society again.

22:15Piers Morgan:Ryan Grimm, you know, a lot of people think the big play here is that the United States, under Donald Trump, they want to get their hands on Venezuela's resources. Max actually posted on X last week, Trump has folded Dick Cheney's fake war on terror into Ronald Reagan's phony war on drugs to justify a war to steal Venezuela's resources. Do you share that view, that this is the bigger picture here? And, you know, how do you argue... When you try and sort of argue against any action against Venezuela, how do you argue that much of the international community does believe it's an illegitimate government that shouldn't be an office to start with?

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25:05It's calling your name. Save on the stay. Oh, and free waffles are yours to claim. Well, I hope you like my little song book direct at choicehiltales.com. Well, yes, I think Trump himself has been pretty transparent and open that the main objective here is Venezuelan resources, in particular, Venezuelan oil. I don't even think that he would deny that. I'm sure you ask him that directly. He'd be like, yeah, that's precisely it. On the question of elections and human rights abuses, yes, sure. I'm glad to hear our fellow panelists uphold the virtues of the International Criminal Court. I hope he agrees with applying those standards universally to other countries that are committing genocides and human rights abuses as well.