134. Has Trump's Administration Committed War Crimes?

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2:39Hello and welcome to The Rest is Politics US with me, Katty Kay, very full of turkey still, I'm afraid a little sleepy from my turkey. All right. Well, you look great caddy. I mean, I'm for those of you that are listening on The podcast as opposed to YouTube. She's in a fashionable Sports jacket, I guess and a jacket only men wear sports jackets net women never wear sports jackets Is it a blazer? I don't know looking good. I'm in my standard issue t-shirt Feeling pretty good today. How is Disney World? You know for me, it's it's always a lot of fun And the excitement that my kids have at that place makes it all worth it for me.

3:18Did anyone throw up on the rides? No, nobody throws up, Kathy. I throw up looking at the rides. Yes, we know that you like solitary vacations. You don't like crowds. Okay, I like Disney Springs. You like, I don't know, these remote islands of nowhere. But okay, what are we talking about today? So today, we are going to be asking whether the Secretary of Defense, I refuse to call him the Secretary of War. Pete Hegseth has committed war crimes by ordering what's called a double tap strike on September the 2nd on an alleged drug smuggling boat off the coast of Venezuela, which killed two people on board who had survived the first blast and were clinging to the remains of the boat.

4:00And there is a lot of discussion in Washington today about whether that constitutes either a war crime or murder. In the second half of the program, we are going to look at President Trump ramping up his anti-immigration policies after a gunman who has been identified as an Afghan national shot two members of the National Guard on Wednesday in Washington on the eve of Thanksgiving, just blocks from the White House. And very sadly, one of the guards, the guardswoman in the attack died over the Thanksgiving holiday. So our thoughts go out to her and her family, of course. But first, we have some very exciting news, which is that Anthony and I are coming to London for a live show next September.

4:41We will be at the South Bank Center on the 6th of September. Sounds like a lot of fun, Katty. I've already got it in my schedule. You can sign up at therestispoliticsus.com, become a founding member, and then you'll get that pre-order link emailed to you, and so you could be with us on the 6th of September. But there'll be a lot of our whole ensemble there, Katty, right? It's not just the two of us. The whole crew, the whole goal hanger crew will be there. All our friends and allies and possibly rivals. Okay, she said it, not me. Alistair, she said rival. I see us as cooperators. He thought it, I said it.

5:21Well, that's true. That is true. Okay, so let's go on with today's program because a lot has been happening over the last few days. There are so many stories actually that we could pick from to cover over this Thanksgiving weekend. Thanksgiving is meant to be quiet, a quiet holiday, but not here in Washington, D.C., or at least not in Trump's Washington, D.C. We are going to start by looking at this curious story of whether the Secretary of Defense may be guilty of war crimes or, according to some former military lawyers, potentially even murder. So here's what happened. Here's the story. On September the 2nd, American surveillance were following a boat in the Caribbean that they were confident was ferrying drugs.

6:05And it showed from the surveillance that there were 11 people on board the boat. Secretary Hegseth gave an order, a verbal order, and the order was to kill everybody. This was reported in the Washington Post. But the strike goes out and two people survive that initial strike and they're clinging to the wreckage. We can see it from the surveillance footage, apparently. The Special Operations Commander, Admiral Bradley, then ordered a second strike on the boat in order to comply with the Secretary of Defense's instructions. This has now all been reported in the Washington Post. And the question is, is that actually a war crime?

6:48So there have been several conservative legal commentators who have come out and said that according to the rules of war and the Department of Defense's own rules of war manual, you are not allowed to take out soldiers who are what is called hors de combat, out of combat, who have been injured or put in a position where they are no longer a threat. And that actually what should have happened there is that they either should have been an attempted rescue of these sailors or they should have been left alone. But it has raised the whole issue politically around the future of Pete Hegseth. How long does he survive?

7:30I think I said on the program a couple of months ago that I'd been hearing that he was not going to be around much beyond January or February. Is he actually even going to make it that far? People are texting me this morning to ask. And where does the rule of law come into this? There's clearly, Anthony, another instance, and we've seen a couple in the last few weeks, of Republican lawmakers now feeling confident enough to push back against at least the Department of Defense because we have the Armed Services Committee in the House, the Armed Services Committee in the Senate, both led by Republicans saying that they plan to launch an investigation into this.

8:11And you've got a few Republican members of the House coming out and of the Senate coming out and saying, this doesn't look good, that actually what may have happened here was illegal and contravened America's own rules of combat. I think it puts Pete Hegseth into a very tricky position. What do you think? There's so much here, Kat. So let's just talk about the law, okay? International humanitarian law. If you're shipwrecked or incapacitated or surrendering as an individual, you're protected people. So if the boat is hit, you're in the water clinging to your life. You're no longer an enemy combatant.

8:49You're supposed to be picked up and made a prisoner of war. uh but that's assuming that you're actually at a war which is unclear as to whether or not we're at war so this is obviously a breach this is obviously a breach of humanitarian law it's a breach of international law and now they're going to do a big airs covering project caddy to try to you know not blame each other or hexeth will blame bradley frank bradley the admiral or vice versa But, you know, he he took the order and this goes back to the Nuremberg trial. So if I'm just following orders, is it a war crime? And I think the clear answer to that is, yes, it is a war crime.

9:29So no one's been convicted. I want to point that out. OK, both of these people will be under investigation, particularly by Democrats. There's no court martial. There's no ICC process yet. And there's been no official Pentagon determination. So I want to I want to be clear about that. I'm just giving my opinion when you've got people in the water that are floating and you're ordering another strike to kill them. That's a reason why the United States is now number seven on the human rights watch list in terms of human rights violations. So the Pentagon, just quickly to come back at that, the Pentagon's to play Pentagon press secretary for a moment.

10:06I'm sitting there in the Pentagon press office and this is what I'm going to say to you. Mr. Scaramucci, that boat caused a lot of debris from that boat. And so we had to do the second strike to get rid of the debris because it was obstructing sea lanes in the area. That is what actually happened. And that's why we had to launch that second strike. What say you, Mr. Member of the Press? You knew people were in the water. Did you know people were in the water? That's the video shows it. Yeah. And so you thought it was smart to strike them, not pick them up before you cleared the debris? And so the answer is, well, we used to be the Americans.

10:45We used to be on the side of right. We had Eisenhower taking photographs of the concentration camps so people would never forget. We had rules of engagement in the Second World War, rules of engagement as Americans. we saw ourselves as valorous but now we see ourselves as norm-breaking and violators of the geneva convention and we now see ourselves in full humanitarian law breach so i don't know does that sound right katie i don't know let me let me be real maga for a second okay because you know i have real maga people in my life i live out here on long island a lot of these people are maga people so hey i don't want drugs coming into the country those boats are moving at 150 315 miles an hour uh they're heading north they've been on watch uh my friend caddy k once joked that her friends in venezuela don't like going out on their yachts anymore they don't want to get shot at so that territory is off limits if you're out there you could get striked by the u.s military uh and so i don't care about that because i'm a maga person in love with maga and I hate drugs and so I'm now going to disavow the due process and all things considering human rights.

12:04That's where they are now, by the way. I mean, they're now over the edge. This is where Rand Paul, I mean, let me just see. Rand, are you under here, Rand? Because I got to look for Rand because I feel like Rand Paul is like becoming my spirit animal because I'm in agreement with Rand Paul. And he was, by the way, ahead of this, right? He was out a month ago talking about the legality, asking about the legality. On that question of we don't like drugs in MAGA and Donald Trump we know doesn't like drugs. His brother was an alcoholic who died from alcoholism. He's always been very opposed to drugs.

12:37So that begs the question and they are doing this operation to stop these narco traffickers bringing cocaine into the United States ostensibly. let's face it, it's been like seven boats. It's a tiny trickle of cocaine that they may or may not stop that was may or may not have been destined to the United States. In the meantime, what has Donald Trump done over the course of the weekend? He has granted a pardon to one Mr. Juan Orlando Hernandez, the former president of Honduras, who is currently serving a 45-year prison sentence in the United States on drug trafficking charges. So the messaging around Venezuela is incredibly mixed at the moment.

13:17And I think that's why you're seeing confusion amongst the American public about what this war is about. Is it about oil? Is it about drugs? If it's about cocaine, why are we pardoning this cocaine trafficker? Is it about trying to expand America's influence in the Western hemisphere? What is this really about? So there's a lot of confusion about what the strategy is and what the end game is. There's also then, I think, real questions about commitment to rule of law that have been raised by this particular incident on September the 2nd. And I can't find anyone really of the people. I mean, you've even got Andrew McCarthy, who's a conservative Fox News legal former assistant attorney general, writing an op-ed today saying that there is really no legal defense for this and that you can't rationalize what happens, that this is all strictly forbidden.

14:14And what's Hegseth's response to all of this been, Anthony? So, Caddy, about 13 hours ago, Pete Hegseth puts out a tweet of Franklin the Turtle, children's book, and he has a classic Franklin story, Franklin Targets Narco-Terrorists, And it shows a combat-equipped Franklin with a surface-to-air rocket-fired propelled grenade, I guess, hitting drug boats off the coast of Venezuela. He says, for your Christmas wish list. And then underneath it, he says, U.S. Southern Command. So, I mean, it is about as garish and about as stupid as anything that you could ever see from a secretary of war or from a secretary of defense or whatever you want to call him.

15:07I'm appalled by it, Caddy. I don't know. What's your reaction to it? I can't tell if it suggests that Hegseth really believes he's in a confident position and can afford to get away with this, and he's kind of doubling down to prove his MAGA bona fides, or whether he's massively misreading the White House room, because I don't think this helps him there. Maybe he thinks in that MAGA mindset, this is the kind of thing you own the libs by shocking everybody with a cartoon and yay, Donald Trump's going to love that. I actually don't think he's reading this one right. I know I've been told this morning by somebody who's in contact with members of the Senate Armed Forces Committee that there is no love lost for Pete Hegseth on the Senate Armed Forces Committee.

15:55There is not much love lost, I'm told, for him in the White House either. And they would be quite happy to get rid of him. But I think what's going to happen is that two people are going to get thrown under the bus here. The bus is rolling down the street and it's going to get two victims. Pete Hegseth is going to throw Admiral Bradley under the bus and say, that order, you misunderstood it. I didn't mean for you to do that second strike. That's not what I meant. And then Donald Trump, who has already said he doesn't like this second strike, which is pretty unusual for him. He would distance himself from the Secretary of Defense.

16:26I think he's going to throw Pete Hegseth under the bus. And then J.D. Vance will get his way and the Secretary of the Army, Dan Driscoll will become the next Secretary of Defense. What do you reckon? Well, yeah, I think Driscoll's obviously, and obviously the FT wrote a good piece about him this weekend. Looks like he will be the Secretary of Defense, or at least he seems to be. And that's consistent with Trump does. He puts the Secretary of Defense in, dislikes him, blows him out. That's what he did with Mark Esper in terms of when he replaced Mattis and he went to the Secretary of army last time he'll likely go there i think what's interesting here though to point out is that vance has influence here katie and vance likes driscoll vance likes driscoll's their friends okay so this goes against some of the things that i've been saying this is anti my pence theory okay this means that vance has way more influence than i originally thought and by the way trump may not even know how close driscoll is to vance i bet if he really knew how close he was to vance Yes, I was wondering that.

17:26Yeah, he wouldn't take him. He's always that close to Vance, F him, that sort of thing. But it looks like Vance is going to get what he wants here. Another question for you about this. Do you think this is another sign that Republican senators feel that Donald Trump is weakened to an extent that they can slightly put their head above the parapet and start to criticize some of his policies? Listen, they're obviously doing that and they're obviously pushing him a little bit, which is the reason why Trump said he didn't like the strike. Because Trump knows that he got pushed around a little bit with the Epstein files.

18:06He knows this is a way overstepping of authority, which is why he's absolutely going to throw Hegseth or Bradley or whoever he needs to throw under the bus. But I want to go to Venezuela for a second because we did comment on this a few weeks ago. I said to people what Trump's plan is there. Trump wants to depose Maduro. He wants to bring in an interim government. There'll be a two and a half year period, possibly interregnum period before they'll have elections. uh looks like the vice president of that country would probably get that post uh they're looking right now to control and or pay off some of the military in there so there isn't a coup where the where the army takes over venezuela katie you know this but i think it's worth repeating to everybody that venezuela is one of the richest countries in south america it's one of the most it has one of the largest oil reserves in the world and uh i'm gonna get in trouble for saying this, but I don't mind saying it.

19:09Trump's looking at that, seeing to himself, okay, how do I get my hands on that? How do I get my family oil exploration license or a pump license? How do I get my family a royalty stream from this oil revenue that can come out of Venezuela? And oh, by the way, if you gave money to my campaign or you're one of my cronies, you can jump into that process as well. And so again, this is also about money, but I just, again, when you're telling people that the airspace over Venezuela is closed, which he did over this weekend, that is once again a violation of international law. That's a violation of the sovereignty of Venezuela.

19:50Whatever you think of Venezuelan leadership, let's say that you're anti-Maduro, which I obviously don't like Maduro, didn't like Chavez, but you have to respect the integrity of the sovereignty of the country of Venezuela. So Trump is saying he doesn't do that. Now, that smacks his high-level colonialism, Caddy, high-level colonialism, and that's not going to go well in Latin America. And my last point, which I think is the most important one, is he wants the money, Caddy. He wants the money. So watch how this unfolds. He had a phone call Maduro. The papers are reporting that he told Maduro, you got to leave.

20:33You can find sanctuary in places like Turkey or other places around the world. There has been some speculation that the Russians would help the Venezuelans. I do not believe that, Cady. I don't believe that speculation because Putin looks at Trump and says, okay, I got this. He wants to control his area of the world. I certainly want to control my area of the world, i.e. Ukraine. So he's not going to offer a lot a relief to Venezuela in the Western Hemisphere is my prediction. And I'm just telling you that this is going to be a problem for the United States in some ways. In other ways, Americans will cheer this, Venezuelans will cheer this, crony capitalism will descend on Venezuela, and it'll be a retaking of that country that's been under the yoke of communism for the last 30 years.

21:22But it's a really, really difficult thing. Yeah, America has an absolutely stellar history of regime change and thinking that it can impose nice, you know, pluralistic, capitalistic, democratic, rule of law based, corruption free governments. He only has to look to Iraq to see how well that goes. I hope that the Senate does, you know, having found a little bit of balls here, manages to hang on to its cojones because I do think that the men and women of the armed services of the United States deserve more legal clarity than they are getting. It is asking an awful lot of enlisted soldiers, of commanding officers to in the midst of a kinetic situation, in the midst of a war type situation or an attack type situation.

22:15It's asking a lot of those men and women to also then have to say, hold on a second, let me just check the DOD's manual on the rules of law, page 533, paragraph six. I'm not sure if I'm allowed to do this. I'm just going to call my lawyer before I do it. I mean, they sign up to serve the United States. They don't sign up to suddenly become instant lawyers. I was talking to and interviewing a former JAG, Judge Advocate General, which is one of the army's military lawyers, effectively, this morning, who said to me, look, these people do deserve a better situation than the situation they're being put in at the moment.

22:53And he also warned that there is a lot of jeopardy for Pete Hegseth if he tries to pin all of this, having given the verbal order himself reportedly, if he tries to pin this on Admiral Bradley and say it's all his fault because Admiral Bradley then is going to have nothing left to lose and he's going to report exactly what he was told to do. I'm sure he recorded the call. Obviously, these guys are not stupid. They recorded the call. But, Cady, I want to go back, if you don't mind, because we did a little... I had the Skybridge economic team do an analysis for us in preparation for today. And I'm going to give you two scenarios quickly in Venezuela.

23:27Number one, pro-US or technocratic government replaces Maduro. That's my prediction. At least that's what the administration wants. You'll see Chevron, exxon conoco phillips etc come back and force into venezuela uh that would ramp up production right now venezuela is 750 000 barrels a day this would put production back into the one and a half to two and a half million barrels within three years now this would crush the leverage that russia and saudi arabia has on opec right and so the the big problem here is for our allies in the middle east that's a 10 to 20 drop per barrel of oil if that happens now trump would probably want that because he would want more leverage over those people uh the flip side is what what i think you and i have seen before you could have the libyan scenario uh where there's an absolute chaos shuts down the production uh and then you see criminal groups and militia fiefdom surge and then oil prices go the other way you give a twenty dollar to forty dollar increase in oil prices i just want to point out to people that when you have regime change as we've experienced over the last 25 years we went from the taliban to the taliban called that regime change we went from a corrupt iraqi government uh with saddam hussein to now a corrupt iraqi government uh which has got Iranian militias all over the country.

24:57So who the hell knows what will happen here? But I mean, there's no great track record for the US. This could end up in a devolvement of unbelievable amounts of economic chaos. Yeah. Anyway, clearly the bond markets think there is going to be regime change because the Venezuela dollar bonds have surged something like 80%, I think this year on the expectation that there will be regime change initiated by the United States. Okay, we'll carry on following this story because I think it's very interesting. I think it's interesting when it means what happens to Hegseth, what happens to the Department of Defense, what happens to the rule of law, what happens to the concept of whether America is at war or is not at war.

25:34I mean, either they're at war and this is a war crime potentially, or they're not at war, in which case it looks like murder. So I think there's a lot of ramifications and it looks interesting politically because of whether the Republicans are actually going to follow through from the Senate and have some sort of investigation. Before we dive back in to our second half, we do want to remind you that episode two of our series on Jeffrey Epstein is out this Wednesday. In episode one, we got into how he really got so rich, his background, how he managed to escape justice in that first conviction.

26:06And in the second episode, we are getting into his relationship with Donald Trump, how the truth has come out, to some extent, starting to come out, and the real extent of his crimes. Do sign up at TheRestIsPoliticsUS.com to listen now and become a founding member. Okay, we'll take a break and come back to talk about Donald Trump's latest immigration crackdown. At Capella University, learning online doesn't mean learning alone. You'll get support from people who care about your success, like your enrollment specialist who gets to know you and the goals you'd like to achieve. You'll also get a designated academic coach who's with you throughout your entire program.

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27:03Christmas, a time for family, friends and reflection. As the turkeys carved, one side of the table praises the portion sizes, the other demands a recount. If you're shopping for the politically obsessed this Christmas, give them something calmer than cable news. A founding membership to the rest is politics, U.S. What could be better than ad-free listening, weekly bonuses, a question and answer session, early access to our live shows and our deep dive series on people reshaping modern America. We've already explored President Ronald Reagan and unelected President Elon Musk. And let's just say the casting calls keep coming.

27:42It's measured, intelligent and global in outlook with just the right dose of perspective and humor in a world that's running short on all of that. Well, listen, whether you're in New York or Newcastle, democracy still deserves a closer listen. So if you'd rather give a gift that sparks the conversation instead of another argument. Make Christmas great again. Head to the rest is politics, US dot com and click on gifts. That's the rest is politics us dot com and click on gifts. Merry Christmas, everybody.