The Dumbroe Doctrine

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:03 Thomas: Remember when it used to just be the conspiracy theory that it was about the oil? And now he's like, ah, it's about the Oil?

0:00:18 Matt: Trump has pardoned now more narco-traffickers than any president in U.S. history.

0:00:32 Thomas: Hello and welcome to an emergency Opening Arguments. This has preempted what I had planned, but I think it's probably, probably worth it. I'm joined by not one expert here, but two as we've got Matt and Liz, the old GG crew, assembled. How's it going, Matt? How's It Going, Liz?

0:00:55 Liz: Yeah. Oh, wow. You think this is the single most important thing that the Trump administration has done? I don't know. I would honestly say defunding USAID and the total switch of moving, just totally carving out the State Department and making the Department of War effectively our Department of Diplomacy and to the extent we have any foreign aid. I actually think that's more consequential.

0:01:21 Thomas: It is true. Yeah, I was going to say the report was that it was killing a lot of people. So, well, we can quibble on that.

0:01:26 Liz: Yeah So I'm gonna go with that which is the only thing that I am optimistic about in our conversation today is that this is like not even close to in my view one of the worst things the trump administration has done in the last

0:01:37 Thomas: Oh wow well maybe we'll get a little bit of a panel style debate speaking of I never do this but because this was such a crazy thing I decided to watch some shit media and I watched the Sunday shows which was supposed to be the sunday show the sundays shows are supposed to be like the better echelon of because I can't do the cable it's just impossible it's it's too stupid I can't do it but the Sunday shows you know especially like the pbs one Boy, I gotta tell you I don't know if, if they've changed or what, but they're also worthless. Like I used to think that was like better, but it's just worthless. And I actually worry. And the reason I bring it up is from watching those shows. And I don'T know if this is because of this particular event or because of the very format and, and kind of incentives of our media has just constantly doing the, uh, manufactured consent thing.

0:01:42 Liz: Year yeah yeah

0:02:26 Thomas: But after watching those shows, I don't even know how much people are going to give a shit about this. Because they just put it in the format of, well, we got Rubio and we'll ask Rubio a few times, hey, what's the legal authority to do this? And he'll be like, oh, well you know, we've got court orders and we're quarantining the ships and not letting them sit. Oh really? What's the illegal authority? And then they'll try a few more times and they're like, alright, well let's get on a Democrat to kind of react to that. And then they'll be like, yeah, no, this isn't legal. And it's like, it's so timid. There's nothing. It's just both sides. And of course they do. The thing I love is when they get the Democrat on, then they got to be like. So do you think it's better than Maduro's got? Like they have to start from a, you know, of course, to be balanced. They got to start with like a hostile question toward the Democrat. That's just there to comment on the illegal thing Trump's done. So they haveto start with, do you think it is a good thing that Maduro is gone? You know, cause that's such a great way to be neutral and both sides, it is just worthless. So I'm hoping that we today can do something not worthless and that some experts here can explain. And it's so funny, Liz, when you first reached out, I was like, oh, great. I love that. But I was kind of like, yeah, that's that's weird because you don't normally reach out on like matters of foreign policy. And then you're like, Oh, yeah. Well, anyway, Maduro is going to be like in the same jail. I forgot he's gonna be in New York. He's gonna Be right where you are. Yeah, I completely forgot. With Luigi, right? Is it the same? Same jail that Luigi's in or whatever? It's the same process? Oh man, how weird. I don't. So, well, why don't we take our usual first break, but there is so much to talk about. And we got questions from patrons. I thought this was important enough to put on the Patreon and we got tons of questions. Thank you guys so much. Really appreciate the folks at patreon.com/law for asking the questions and for making this all happen and funding

0:03:18 Liz: He's gonna be in Brooklyn he's going to be two miles down the road. Like not even two miles from me. With Luigi. Yeah. MDC.

0:04:16 Thomas: In a small way, something that isn't as worthless as a CBS News Sunday show. So really appreciate you. And after the break, we're going to get to many of the questions and really break this down.

0:04:29 Ad: [Ad break 1 — ad music]

0:04:29 Thomas: I know you have an agenda, Matt. Now, obviously, I'm going to let you get into it. I don't mean like in a political way, but a literal agenda, like for what we're gonna talk about. But I did want to just just quickly follow up on that New York thing to ask, like, why is he there? Is that where where he would just go? Like, what is that process?

0:04:45 Liz: It's a good question. I have to say when I first heard that he was being brought by boat and then plane and would be facing charges in SDNY, I asked myself why. And there are a couple of answers to that question. And I think the most direct answer and probably the correct one is that in 2020, he was indicted out of SDNY for basically the same set of charges that he's subject to now. They just did a superseding indictment that did actually, I mean, the same sort of charges. They just did superseding that kind of changed a few things around, removed a bunch of Honduras references. I can't imagine why.

0:05:22 Thomas: Man. We'll get to that.

0:05:24 Liz: Seriously, seriously. And so I think that's basically why it's like, well, it was already there.

0:05:24 Matt: Forgotten about that already.

0:05:29 Liz: That being said, I do think there were some kind of interesting thoughts. I'm in a New York lawyers chat and some people were saying like, I wonder if they're keeping it in New York in order to justify sending federal troops or federal forces into New York while Zoran is mayor. I mean, it does come, you know, two days after his inauguration. I think that's certainly an interesting point.

0:05:50 Thomas: We also got the story that Trump was over all that. I don't know. I didn't read it too deeply, but I kept seeing the headlines that, ah, Trump's given up on all that crap. So I don' know. Is that, maybe that was fake. He got bored and he's like, wait a minute. I can do war game, fun military stuff abroad okay

0:05:58 Liz: Yeah, well, that's definitely true, right? He's, you don't give it up on sending the National Guard in. But I don't know, maybe an excuse.

0:06:07 Liz: Exactly. He got bored. He found that. Maybe it's, the other thing I was saying, It was like maybe just kind of poking Zoran in the eye, the idea being like, look, see, federal is still more powerful. We can have this prosecution that you're going to condemn as violating international and domestic law, and we can do whatever we want. But I truly just think it's because of the original 2020 indictment and the fact that they're only going to bring, I mean, like historically, right, like if you look at these kind of big international prosecutions, they're Only going to be brought in a couple of federal districts, right? They're being brought down Miami. Maybe there's a couple really prominent ones being brought out of L .A.

0:06:41 Liz: They're being brought out of the SDNY, EDNY, and

0:06:35 Thomas: So it might be a matter of like resources and skill and know

0:06:49 Liz: Then the EDVA gets a lot of pretty sophisticated stuff as well, Eastern District of Virginia, because they cover Arlington, I mean that whole area, right? Because that's where they get a lot of the foreign surveillance type stuff, which is kind of interesting. Point being, it is a sophisticated group of prosecutors, I guess, that work there that are smart and intelligent and have experience in doing these types of prosecutions. And they did it in 2020, 20. So why not keep it here?

0:06:50 Thomas: -how what's the edva sorry oh okay that makes sense yeah yeah right

0:07:16 Matt: Count one is terrorism. So I mean, it is SDNY specialty, certainly.

0:07:20 Thomas: But I just wanted to ask like legally speaking if they wanted to especially since they did that superseding indictment could they have just decided well the whatever district of you know alabama I don't know like whatever they wanted it could they have done that or was there any legal reason

0:07:35 Liz: Yeah, I think so. Because I think the jurisdictional nexus, I mean, the jurisdctional nexus is basically that Maduro is using cocaine as a weapon and flooding the US with cocaine as terrorist act.

0:07:47 Matt: Yeah, pretty much.

0:07:48 Liz: As long as you can find some evidence that cocaine has been sold that more or less probably came through some route that you can attach Maduro to in whatever district, you could hit the jurisditional stuff there. I think New York would be easier, but you know.

0:08:00 Thomas: As a wmd gotcha I do think it's interesting though because my first thought was like as much as trump is all anti -cities and anti you know they're always then they think it'S SO UNJUST HOW HE WAS TREATED blah blah blah I think there could be a component correct me if I'm wrong where this is pretty important and like well we should we should let the people who are good at this handle it like that is the place where you're probably going to get probably going TO GET SOME of the best work done on this is that you think that's part of

0:08:23 Liz: Yeah, I think that's absolutely part of it.

0:08:25 Thomas: It all right well with that I'll hand it over matt I know you have a helpfully prepared an agenda for us so I'm really excited to get to all

0:08:25 Matt: Yeah has to be. Yeah, there's so much to cover and so many great questions here. So, I just wanted to break it down into kind of subjective areas, kind of take it through. We're going to get back to the indictment. We're gonna go deep on the indictments, I think, in a way that you're not going to hear in other places, thanks to Liz. But I wanted to start with question one, which quite a few patrons had asked. So So I just want to shout out a dinosaur dental school, Central Kazoo, Spun Right Round, Todd the Odd, a couple of others actually in variations. And that question is what the f**k just happened? They all asked that question to some degree.

0:08:47 Thomas: This dinosaur dental school yeah yeah I suppose we better capture the basics just in

0:08:58 Matt: Right. We are recording this within essentially 36 hours, 48 hours of the U .S. There are two acts here that we need to talk about. There's a military strike, which is now, as we know, killed upwards of 80 people, Venezuelans, no U .s. troops. It sounds like there's some injuries, but nobody died.

0:08:59 Thomas: Case wait what when was that they that killed a bunch I thought really I holy crap I didn't see

0:09:13 Matt: But the military strike was yesterday. That was incidental to the arrest. The military strike to 80 Venezuelans. Yeah, at least. Yeah. No, that's the current count.

0:09:21 Thomas: That sorry did you see that liz am I crazy because I watched all this coverage of it I didn't see anyone say that a bunch of Venezuelans died.

0:09:27 Matt: Well, no Americans were killed. So yeah.

0:09:28 Thomas: Yeah, that's all I heard anybody say.

0:09:30 Liz: Didn't get an exact number, but I heard, yeah, no, people seem to really be dismissing the amount of, yeah.

0:09:33 Thomas: What the, wow. Our media, even the quote unquote alleged liberal media, I'm telling you, so sorry to keep chiming in, but I'm pretty outraged that I just watched four Sunday

0:09:39 Liz: That's actually pretty messed up.

0:09:46 Thomas: Shows and not a single one of them said that. I had no idea that that many Venezuelians were killed.

0:09:46 Matt: Yeah., the initial count was 40 and it's going up.

0:09:52 Liz: Yeah that's a huge number.

0:09:54 Matt: We're now, yeah, I'm just confirming New York Times as of today, as of the moment of recording, and I'm sure it's gonna go up and several houses were destroyed, civilian homes as well. So that to me is the starting point for the illegality here. But of course, on top of that, then we did arrest the president and his wife. And it sounds like this operation was being planned for months, and they lied to Congress about it, about this intention to do this. It sounds like also the New York Times and Washington Post had this story, at least as of last week, and chose not to publish anything about it.

0:09:55 Thomas: Holy shit. Wow, Wow. Oh, okay. Wow. So I did see Rubio say like, and we know we couldn't tell Congress because they would leak. And we do know that there were some media organizations that had this and we're thankful for them for not publishing it. And I didn't know who he was talking about, but he was actually talking about the New York freaking times.

0:10:33 Matt: At least, yeah. And yeah, national security. So yeah, we're going to talk through the legality, which there isn't much, but I just want to make sure that we say that definitively. I've already published on our Blue Sky Feed the definitive OA legal guide to this, and it is just empty. There's nothing there. There is nothing really to talk about. But I want want to try to explain what they're going to say, because this is very important. This is a precedent they're gonna try to rely on. And they're Gonna try to pretend like this is a normal thing that the country can do or that other countries could do. And unfortunately, I'm afraid it's going to become a normal Thing. That's actually, that's my biggest argument for why this is the most important thing that Trump has done so far the most significant thing globally, because I think it's gonna open real Pandora's box here for the rest of the world, potentially.

0:11:12 Matt: But Russ Barron asks, I guess I'll ask the obvious, how the hell is this legal? We're not at war. Congress hasn't declared it. And it sure as shit feels like a goddamn war. Good point. So I think that we can all agree pretty much straight up that, and I think from what I've seen, pretty much any honest lawyer would tell you this, there's no international legal basis for what we've done here.

0:11:18 Thomas: 70

0:11:31 Matt: Now, as we've just discussed, there is an indictment out of SDNY. That's what they're relying on.

0:11:35 Thomas: Different times Rubio said, oh, there's an indictment and no one did anything about it. He was indicted in 2020 or something. No one did anything about it. And so as though that somehow like, oh, okay, well, I didn't realize that. So therefore you can go into a country and just kidnap somebody. And yeah, like how does that even provide any rationale for it?

0:11:44 Matt: Yep, well, yes.

0:11:53 Liz: It doesn't. And I think what we just have to think through as we talk about this, right, is this sort of shift that we're seeing in the U .S. and in the authoritarian approach to law, which is to say law under the Trump administration, there's no rule of law under under the Trump administration. There is rule by law and there is the use of law as an instrument, which has to say laws deployed to explain things when it is appropriate. And that's what we're saying. It's rule by law. It is not rule of law. And so any sort of inconsistencies throughout like all the WTF takes here are correct because Because we're sort of engaging in after the fact, justifications, rationales, picking and choosing what law is we think is appropriate, ignoring international law, calling this a law enforcement action when it is very clearly violative of the UN Charter, right?

0:12:44 Liz: I mean, it just, that's what we're, that'S what we'RE engaging in.

0:12:44 Thomas: So here's the reframing just to make sure we have it. I'm actually astonished at the degree to which this felt normal and felt like nothing just based on the conversation, because they get to calmly say in very calm fashion, look, this is a law enforcement thing. He had an indictment. That's law. So that's legal, right? Law, indictment, that's a legal thing. So the law enforcement was just assisted by the military. That sounds so innocent. So why is that stupid?

0:13:11 Matt: Just executing a warrant, you know, like the military does using helicopters and heavy tanks and stuff. Yeah, no, this is, so yeah, let me just break down because I do want to make sure that I think a lot of this is getting lost in these two different acts, the fact that we conducted a military strike and that we conduct an arrest. Now, the military strike itself is just obviously illegal because we can only attack under, that was in Article 2, Section 4 of the UN Charter.

0:13:12 Liz: Just executing a warrant, that.

0:13:13 Thomas: Yeah, just executing war, yeah.

0:13:36 Liz: So yeah, so Article 2, Section 4 of the US Charter says, all members shall refrain in in their international relations, from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state or in any other manner inconsistent with the purposes of the United Nations. Which is to say, you can't just go use force against another state. Just to be clear, just to step back, this is the UN Charter. It is the law of the land. By joining the UN, we signed the charter. We signed it in July of 1945. The Senate approved a resolution resolution that

0:13:55 Thomas: Do whatever you want. Yeah. Was anything happening around that time that led to...

0:14:10 Liz: Ratified it. I can't even imagine. And just to be clear, like, just go to the Constitution on this. The U .S. Constitution provides that the president has the power with the advice and consent of the Senate to make treaties, provided that two thirds of the Senate agrees. Right. And so that's what happens. So when that happens and the Senate passes this resolution to ratify, that means that a treaty becomes the law of the land. All right. Like, it is the supreme law of land. It's the force of federal legislation. So just to be clear. Like it's not like, oh, this is some weird like we didn't sign up for the the International Criminal Court. Like, no, no. Like, we signed up. We signed the thing. Yeah.

0:14:38 Thomas: Right right well that's that's important because I think we are used to in this day and age for one yes that answer of like well we don't actually you know sign on to that international criminal court because we don'T can'T we DON'T want to be prosecuted for a bunch of stuff so that or there's another thing that that goes on that I think has gone on for decades which is we donT ratify treaties so often it'll be like you know well we have some agreement or something you know international but like it'll never get ratified so there's never actually any teeth to it it's something that I think dates back to Clinton, I want to say, or pre -Clinton. So there's those two things. But with this, we're not talking about any of that.

0:15:13 Thomas: We're talking about something that is the frigging law of the land. Wow.

0:15:16 Matt: But also international law. But one thing they're expected to rely on here that it seems like they're relying on is a memo from the Office of Legal Counsel from one Bill Barr from 1989.

0:15:23 Thomas: Oh, memo. Okay. I didn't know there was a memo.

0:15:26 Matt: There is a a memo.

0:15:26 Thomas: Nevermind guys. There's a memo who

0:15:27 Liz: Guess

0:15:27 Matt: Yep, that should have led with that. Yeah.

0:15:29 Liz: Who wrote the memo?

0:15:30 Thomas: Satan.

0:15:31 Liz: An old friend of ours. He's got the initials BB.

0:15:35 Matt: Assistant Attorney General Bill Barr. Yes, responsible for this outlier opinion, which has never actually been acted upon. So this was six months before Panama, which we're going to get to. But Bill Barr literally said, I'm just going to read the concluding paragraph here. We conclude that the president acting through the attorney general has inherent constitutional authority to deploy the FBI, not the military, but the FBI to investigate and arrest individuals for violations of U.S. law, even if those actions contravene international law. And he's got a convoluted thing in this 22 -page memo about how actually the UN Charter is not self -executing and we can just ignore it. If we want to just go abduct people, we can do that.

0:15:39 Thomas: What? And that's still Stan. Like when you're saying that was written after we'll get to the Panama thing, which is something they point to as kind of a precedent, I suppose, for this, but you're saying that no one undid that? That's not anything?

0:16:14 Matt: That memo is, sure. Closest thing. No, it's just this loaded gun still there.

0:16:25 Thomas: Really?

0:16:25 Liz: Mm -hm.

0:16:25 Thomas: Not even like Biden? Why is that? Is that the kind of thing they just don't bother doing?

0:16:30 Matt: It's not really binding. It just sort of, this is OLC's opinion as of 1989. And it was very convenient because they needed that for Noriega at the time, although they didn't later for reasons we'll talk about. But I just wanted to mention that, that that is a minority opinion, obviously. I think as far as I know, that's the only time the US government has said anything like that, that we are completely exempt from, you know, that we can go and just kidnap and abduct people. As we'll talk about, the Supreme Court has no problem whatsoever with kidnapping and abduction to get people to the United States to stand trial. We're going to get to that part. But I just want to point out just as a straight up starting point that both the military strike, because this again, there's no self -defense here. That's the closest thing they're going be able to argue is they're gonna say it's self -defence because Maduro, who again, Venezuela itself, even just looking at it from the best side we can from their side, responsible for maybe 10 to 15 14 % of cocaine trafficking, and most of that is going to Europe.

0:17:13 Matt: And as Witt of Hazy's Porpoise, one of my favorite patron names, pointed out, yes,

0:17:16 Liz: That person, can we just, like, give a shout -out to Whit of Habeas Porpoise? Like, thank you.

0:17:18 Thomas: Yes, please.

0:17:19 Matt: Really appreciate Hazy as Porpoises, pointed out something that I noticed right away, which is that the word fentanyl does not appear in this indictment, but that's all we've been hearing about with Venezuela, right? That's all we've Been hearing about.

0:17:25 Liz: No. Because they're not doing the Ventanil game.

0:17:30 Matt: Nope, nope, they're bailing to cocaine. Part of the self -defense thing is that we have designated, and the list actually, just looking at it before we got on, the list of foreign terrorist organizations that we Have designated this year is mostly cartels, which has never happened before. We've actually never designated cartels, and that is very concerning. It's completely unnecessary to designate them as foreign terrorist organizations, but obviously it ebbs the ante for all of this. It makes them not necessarily more legitimate military targets, but it makes them much easier to prosecute and to impose sanctions. So the main one here, though, is the Cartel de los Soles, which I hadn't even noticed. On November 24th, we designated the CartEL de los Soles, which does not exist, much like

0:18:05 Thomas: Wait, what? They don't exist?

0:18:05 Matt: Antifa. So that is the informal name. It doesn't exist. It is the informal name for sort of the group of people around Maduro and the Venezuelan government who have been working with drug traffickers. They're not a real cartel.

0:18:15 Thomas: Oh, wow. So this This is quite a premeditated crime going on.

0:18:17 Matt: Oh yeah. And this kind of slipped by just before Thanksgiving. You didn't even notice that they designated it and just a little preview there.

0:18:20 Thomas: Yeah. On the topic of self -defense, I watched the press conference and just, again, more fascist theater that got the dingus general that's like in charge, whatever, gives the breakdown of what happened. It's so, just watching that and just seeing like how much they apparently think if you use a bunch of words that like, it's almost like he's giving his job interview where he's like, with lethal precision, with precise force, with our trained or well -trained men. They went in with precise kinetic with precise force and precise and precision and discipline and like if you make a big deal about how disciplined it is then it's like oh okay well I don't care it was totally illegal then as long as you were precise and disciplined about it it's totally fine but I bring it up too because you heard him say or sorry I shouldn't say you if you watched it I heard him saying four five times self -defense they're like yeah and as we were you know abducting someone from another country we did also fire in self -defence which I just think is so funny.

0:18:42 Matt: Kinetic action. Yeah. Yeah, right.

0:19:16 Thomas: As though if your home is being invaded and literally someone has kidnapped your child and then you shoot at them, they're like, well, I shot back in self -defense. It's self -defence. Like, what are you talking?

0:19:17 Matt: It's so bad. Right.

0:19:27 Liz: -hum.

0:19:27 Thomas: It's not definitionally not self -defence if you are in another country unlawfully, right? Anyone want to answer? No, right. Yes.

0:19:36 Liz: No, I mean, the reason why they're saying that is, going back to what Matt's saying, is this idea of declaring these cartels as foreign terrorist organizations. This sort of rubric, again, this is using law. It is not rule of law. It is rule by law. Showing that these organizations and Maduro are threatening the security of the U .S. or the national security of U .K. That's why. That's what they're doing. That's the reason they're not saying self -defense repeatedly. Because if you keep saying it, it's true.

0:20:01 Thomas: I also think there's something else going on, which is whether intentional or not the fascist mindset that like, Well, we're going to do what we're gonna do. And I think they would say like, Like we weren't going in there trying to kill anybody, but like, you know, if they're going to stop us from the thing we're doing, we're going to fire back in self -defense. And it's like this fascist idea that like, well, yeah, America is going to America. We get to do what we want. And if anyone tries to kind of intervene when we're kidnapping a leader of another state, then, you Know, we can, we Can do self -defence stuff. Like we can go ahead and fire. Of course, like they're firing on our troops. Like, of course it's our troops ridiculous.

0:20:33 Matt: So I want to mention Mike Lee because he had originally tweeted you know I look forward to seeing what the constitutional basis for this is and then like two hours later this is Mike Lee of Utah. He had a quote very similar to what you just said. I just wanted to this is in writing, so we can't play a clip. But Marco Rubio has informed me that Nicolas Maduro has been arrested by U .S. personnel to stand trial in criminal charges, and that the kinetic action we saw tonight was deployed to protect and defend those arresting, executing the arrest warrant.

0:20:57 Matt: This action likely falls within the president's inherent authority. So good enough for me.

0:21:00 Liz: Oh, come on. What a loser. What a loser?

0:21:01 Thomas: No, absolutely not. Unbelievable. Unbelievable. What's the part? Yeah. What changed?

0:21:02 Matt: Yeah, absolutely. I know. Like, just take a stand. I mean, this is, he

0:21:08 Thomas: Because like for him to be like, wow, looking forward to the authority, was he like, oh, I just found out that President Trump did it. Never mind. It's fine. Like what would have changed in that time? Even for him as a Republican, it's just crazy. Like there's no difference in that. You didn't know that they were going to say that bullshit? Like what, you know, like what information did you gain that made you change that opinion? That's crazy. Crazy.

0:21:19 Matt: Got a call from Marco Rubo, literally. Yeah.

0:21:31 Liz: Yeah, I agree.

0:21:29 Matt: Yeah, it's, it'S worthless. I also want to point out, Stephen Miller, back on October 24th, I found this clip where he said that basically, if you think drugs are killing your kids, that's Maduro. And if you thinking criminal aliens are killing your kids, they're Maduro, right? They've just been laying this groundwork. Obviously, all the stuff with the boat strikes this entire time, which is to kind of soften us up and get us used to the idea that we're just killing Venezuelans at random, knowing the whole time they were going to do this for months,

0:21:53 Thomas: Boy, right now, every TikTok video is Stranger Things clips of like, oh, they were signaling this in the early seasons. And now we're doing the version of that where the fascism version was just, oh shit, there was an Easter egg that Stephen Miller left us about the fascismo they were going to do. Oh, season one of fascism. I didn't even see that coming. Yeah, so dark. Oh my God. Oh boy. No, that's the appropriate. I think that's the appropriate level of absurdity and horror that we're in, you know? It's just ridiculous.

0:22:08 Matt: I don't want to call them fan theories, but I had some theories about all this myself that I have signaled and that we'll talk about. Out. Sorry.

0:22:15 Liz: Wow. Wow. Wow. That broke me.

0:22:22 Matt: That's where we're at. Yes, it is. It is. Yeah. Before we move on to a couple other things, another quick patron question. I saw someone comparing this to Nixon slash Kissinger and Bush nonsense, which never had any sort of consequences. Isn't this materially different in any way? And of course, Kissinger was secretly responsible for bombing Cambodia. It just came out later. This was very flagrant. He won a Nobel Peace Prize for doing that. So, well, actually for resolving, allegedly.

0:22:44 Thomas: Consequences, good.

0:22:45 Liz: I can't. I... Yeah.

0:22:45 Matt: Yeah, right. And died as an old man, free and not in prison for some some reason. And Bush, of course, responsible for the deaths of at least a million people probably from a completely pretextual invasion of Iraq that was supposed to be something to do with self -defense because they were violating UN weapons inspection treaties or something. I mean, we all remember that. We lived through it in 2003.

0:23:02 Thomas: Boy, you knows what was a crazy thought I had, speaking of dark and absurd, was like, well, shit, I wish Bush had just done this. Like, that actually would have been a lot better. It wouldn't have been, you just been like, alright, we're going and getting Saddam or something with some action like this. I don't know if they, maybe they tried to do that, actually. I don'T even remember. It's been a long time, but like, I had this dark thought of like, boy, that would have Been a lot better, weirdly.

0:23:25 Liz: I think it's sort of interesting to think about the lead -up to the Iraq War and the extent that it was totally papered over some of the New York Times articles in the lead up. All this stuff that was kind of going into that. And then this, which was like starting in September, let's just start bombing some boats and using the word narco -terrorism a lot. And then let's go. And then let us have a totally incoherent press conference where we say it's narco terrorism. It's immigration. It is. Oh, actually, it is just that we need to get some oil.

0:23:56 Matt: We're running the country now. So here we are. I actually want to point out not just the 2003 Iraq invasion, but also the 1990 Iraq invasion. Does anybody remember the testimony from Nayyirah? I actually remember this pretty clearly. So Naira was a 15 -year -old Kuwaiti girl who testified before Congress. She actually lied to Congress.

0:24:07 Thomas: Who or what is Naira?

0:24:15 Matt: And she also lied about who she was because she was the daughter of the Kuwait ambassador who was part of the royal family and didn't mention that in her testimony.

0:24:15 Thomas: Oh, what? Holy shit. I've never heard of this.

0:24:23 Matt: Yep. And this is incredible that she testified about how Saddam's troops were killing babies in hospitals and how brutal they were. And of course, Saddam Hussein was brutal, there's no question. He did did terrible things to people. But this was all kind of like a planned publicity campaign.

0:24:24 Liz: Well, I did not know this. Wow.

0:24:38 Matt: And my point is that between this and then Colin Powell going to the UN to talk about weapons of mass destruction, they were trying, right? They were at least putting out a pretext. This is just compared to that. And again, that was awful, right, that's no good.

0:24:50 Thomas: Remember when it used to just be the conspiracy theory that it was about the oil and now he's like, it's about the oil. Just hold on. Let me get into the mic. It's about the oil.

0:24:54 Matt: But right, no, yep, within hours. It's

0:24:59 Thomas: Any questions? And then I saw it literally see reporters

0:25:00 Matt: Not even good oil. It'S not even oil we want.

0:25:03 Thomas: After that being like, you know, the subtext there was about oil. And it's like, no, I literally heard him subtext. It wasn't subtext, it was text. It was super text. It was in the, it's not a footnote. It Was directly said that the oil,

0:25:13 Matt: And I got to say, I have the same issue with people who are saying this is a distraction from the Epstein -Fowles. This is very much part of the purpose. This is a thing they want to do. It's just another terrible thing they're doing.

0:25:20 Thomas: Yeah, yeah. I agree with that. I disagree with that actually. Yeah.

0:25:24 Liz: Yeah. I think that is right. Right.

0:25:27 Thomas: It could also be both, but yeah, you you know, kind of. Yeah. But it is interesting. I wouldn't blame people for thinking it could be a distraction from Epstein because

0:25:27 Liz: Although, you know, why not both, though, at this point? You know, it's like this. I think there are just so many intersecting reasons. Like, sure. Why not? This seems like a great time to do this.

0:25:42 Thomas: I think we I think it's at least worth trying to explain. I don't know if either of you can help out a little bit. Try to explain the change in Trump because he's not consistent about a lot of things, but he actually was pretty consistent for a long time about not no foreign wars, no whatever he was against. You know, he was the only one on the Republican stage in 2015, 16 in those primaries, the only one actually who would who would bash Bush. And like the other it was I think it was one of the reasons he he won the primary was because it kind of did show his independence and honesty from a Republican perspective.

0:26:17 Thomas: He bashed Bush. He said it was bad. Everyone else on that stage reacted as though there was going to be outrage to that. And there was a little bit, but mostly no one cared because, yeah, Bush sucks. And so it is a change of Trump, I think. And first off, do you reject that premise? Secondly, Do you have an explanation for that? What it might be?

0:26:32 Matt: Think he doesn't think he's starting a war. I think the way he's talking that we're being greeted as liberators and that the country is going to take care of itself and we'll be running it by tomorrow. That doesn't seem to be happening yet as of the time of recording. That's my first thought, Liz?

0:26:42 Liz: I think that's right. I mean, also, I think we're entering it. I just think, you know, term to Trump, he's a little more deranged, a little more demented, a little less principled. Like to accept he had principles. I just think it's kind of like he's like, I mean I think that there's a lot of stuff that happens with him that's kind of weird. And I just just think, where's he at in sort of the dimension and like sort of the sleep calendar? I think he explained that. The other thing that I thought was kind of interesting was, there's a pretty good New York Times article, and I hate to give him credit, but called how oil drugs and immigration fueled Trump's Venezuela campaign. And you know, what that made pretty clear was it wasn't just it's not just about the oil. It's not just about anything. It'S about, you know. Marco Rubio and Stephen Miller just hanging out with each other, both with like kind these dueling agendas that are sort of aligning with this, which is Rubio has always wanted to stick his finger in the eye of Venezuela because it's a longtime ally of Cuba. And he wants to topple. He wants to, I mean, that is like, you have to understand that is a huge, huge driving foreign policy goal for

0:27:44 Thomas: That's a good point.

0:27:44 Liz: Rubio. And Miller, who is just like, F immigrants, let's just do more mass deportations.

0:27:50 Thomas: What? You're doing something against a brown person? That's fine. Yeah fine. It works for me. I'll sign off on that.

0:27:53 Liz: Yeah. And let's like blow, it's fun to blow things up. So they, I think they were both kind of like Tweedledee and TweedleDum on his side being like, so the way that we get serious about Venezuela is doing exactly this.

0:27:57 Thomas: Sure. Yeah that's a great point. I think you could tell a change in Rubio because a lot of times with stuff with Trump Rubio looks like he's falling asleep and doesn't want to be there and is like dear God I can't believe I have to. This he's very active on. This is something he wants. That's a great point that like in Trump 2 .0, to probably a greater extent than ever, he's maybe not necessarily running the show. I'm sure I think he I think He does want to sign off on virtually everything because I think you know, assuming he's awake. But this does comes across to me as Rubio really wanted this and took an active role in it. So that's a good point. Wow.

0:28:37 Matt: Yeah, he's been talking about it for years.

0:28:38 Liz: Exactly. And I think the other thing is Trump was facing some pressure. So the history of US oil exploration in Venezuela is quite interesting and quite messed up. But one of the things that's worth noting is the last US oil operator there, Chevron, They operate there despite all of the sanctions you've heard a lot about. They operate their because they get a special license from the State Department saying they can operate there. And Trump was under a lot of pressure by pretty conservative pro -Cuba lawmakers who are good friends with Rubio to revoke that license for obvious reasons. Because we're trying to conduct this pressure campaign with Venezuela, but yet effectively billions of American dollars are also being sent by way of Chevron to Venezuela, which which is, by the way, the exact same thing that happened during the Cold War with Angola, but also with Chevron. But nevertheless, and so I think that Trump's under this pressure, but he's like, wait, I don't want Chevron to pull out. In fact, I want Chevro to expand their operations. How could I possibly do that? And then it's like ding, ding, ding, here's your solution.

0:29:37 Thomas: Yeah, that is weird about Chevron too, because so they're the outlier kind of doing whatever they want in a way that seemed like counter to US government, you know wishes in a away. And now they're like the hero of this story. Like they're the one oil company that they're like, oh, our U .S. oil companies are going to come do this better. And I just have to point out, not that anyone needs to hear this probably, but the idea that this is merely an interdiction or whatever, a police action, if that were true, there'd be no discussion of the f***ing oil.

0:30:06 Thomas: That has nothing to do with anything. If this was just about a police act, oh he's a bad guy, police action indictment. Okay, why are you talking about taking over the oil? It makes no sense. It has nothing to do with that.

0:30:16 Matt: No, and you're showing your hand pretty quick. Also, I wanted to point out, if you cared that much about narco -trafficking, I was just doing the math on this, and I think that Trump has pardoned now more narco traffickers than any president in US history. Not just Juan Orlando Hernandez, who was the former president of Honduras that we've talked about recently, that he just sort of pardoned out of nowhere. It sounds like Roger Stone was actually pretty instrumental in that. But also, Garnett Gilbert Smith was one of the DEA's biggest narco trafficking prosecutions out of Baltimore, big drug dealer in that area. And then Ross Ulbricht from the Silk Road, which I support a little bit more than some of these other ones. He was running basically an online marketplace, never actually sold drugs himself, but he was pardoned from a couple of lives. I know that that one's arguable, but I can make that argument better than the others.

0:30:53 Liz: Yeah I'm sure but but whatever. I mean, yeah,

0:30:57 Thomas: Well, but the other ones were prosecuted by the corrupt Biden administration, I assume, right? So that makes it okay.

0:30:57 Liz: That's fair.

0:30:57 Matt: But that's just three. Right. I think so. Right? But these are major, major DEA, DOJ prosecutions. Like they put a lot of work into all three of those cases and he just undid them.

0:31:08 Liz: Just as a little behind the scenes, what does that mean? I will just say from the perspective of the handful of DOJ prosecutors that I talked to here and there, they get really upset when you do this, when Trump does this. Trump pardoning, they put a lot of work. It's really hard to prosecute someone on particularly these types of complicated allegations. They do a lot more. They take a lot lot of pride in their work. And they're not like, oh, we just work for the president. So he decided to pardon them. On with our mission. There are a lot of people that are really pissed off because their hard work has been undone. I just want to note that as a kind of, this is not surprising to anyone, but I've literally just had prosecutors just tell me this and express a lot of frustration.

0:31:21 Matt: I would think.

0:31:21 Thomas: God, I would hope so.

0:31:29 Matt: Yeah. Right, sure.

0:31:42 Thomas: Yeah, yeah,

0:31:52 Matt: Sure.

0:31:52 Liz: In particular, this was done in the context of the Eric Adams case. Just know know that there are a lot of people seizing, a lot of prosecutors seizing.

0:31:58 Matt: We talked about this a couple of weeks ago. We talking about this actually, but imagine the US attorney for DC and watching every one of those January 6th prosecutions, you spent your entire term going after all being undone, right? I mean, that's genuinely upsetting and no doubt. So we should move on here and talk a little bit about some of the history before we get into this indictment.

0:32:07 Liz: Horrible. Yeah. Yeah.

0:32:15 Thomas: As long as we will come back, I think the main thing that everyone is talking about is the Honduras thing. As we come back to that part and I, okay, good. Okay. Okay then then by all means hmm

0:32:23 Matt: We're going to compare. Yeah. We are going to get to comparisons. Yep. For sure. Some cops. Yeah, we'll talk history.

0:32:31 Ad: [Ad break 2 — ad music]

0:32:31 Matt: I can't wait to get the indictment, but we have got to talk about history. And Elsa Gonsorowski has a question that I think we should answer before we move on. We could spend the next four hours on this one, but just let's do a quick rundown. I know this is a law show, but I feel like I need a history lesson. What should US Americans know about Venezuelan history, law, or politics? Where can I start? Liz has a lot to say about this for reasons that I was very surprised to learn today.

0:32:52 Matt: But I just want to mention historically going back to the Monroe Doctrine, which Trump is, I mean, I shouldn't say resurrected because it's always been, but it's going to remind everybody in 1823 that President Monroe in his address to Congress said very clearly that it is our job as in the Western Hemisphere, as long as basically Europe can stay to Europe, we're going to stay to the Western Hemisphere, we don't expect that Europe's going to interfere. Now, of course, that was completely toothless because we didn't have much of an army or navy in 1823.

0:33:16 Matt: And France, in fact, came over and invaded Mexico not long after that. But eventually, we got around to the point where we started taking that seriously. And Roosevelt in 1904 introduced the idea of the international police power, sort of his corollary to the Monroe Doctrine.

0:33:27 Liz: Can we just pause on Monroe Doctrine and note the Dunrow Doctrine?

0:33:31 Thomas: Yeah

0:33:32 Matt: I was about to get to that. That.

0:33:33 Liz: Sorry, I just, I can't help myself.

0:33:35 Matt: I know, I know. I couldn't wait either. You got the Roosevelt Corollary, which is that we now have this international police power that we can sort of intervene in these countries if we feel like they're getting out of hand, which we certainly have done quite a lot. And we do not have time to talk about all the different ways we've intervened in Latin America, which still don't even really compare to what we just saw the other day. But the Dunrow Doctrine, I will read from the National Security. The US released a national security strategy in June, which made it pretty clear that we feel specifically that we should intervene when it comes to narco-terrorism and monarchy trafficking, and they've been really focused on that. So that's the Dunrow doctrine, unfortunately.

0:33:57 Thomas: What

0:34:09 Matt: Great question.

0:34:07 Thomas: Is narco -terrorism just wondering all right

0:34:09 Matt: Great questions. We're going to talk about that when we get to the indictment, but it's an open question.

0:34:12 Thomas: Pin in

0:34:14 Liz: Narcoterrorism is the theory, just very briefly though, that Venezuela is flooding the U.S. with cocaine as a weapon.

0:34:19 Matt: And that cartels themselves are terrorists because...

0:34:21 Thomas: That okay so it's dumb okay just just

0:34:23 Matt: Well, see, that part is dumb, but

0:34:23 Liz: Yeah, it's dumb. And that the cartels themselves are terrorists, that they're committing foreign terrorist attacks, that they're trying to harm the U.N.

0:34:24 Thomas: There's not like a real version of narco okay

0:34:29 Matt: That part's true.

0:34:31 Liz: National security by flooding the U.S. with cocaine.

0:34:32 Thomas: Which part's true

0:34:33 Matt: Well, the part that they are actively threatening governments in places like Mexico and Honduras and El Salvador, they have been a real terrorist threat.

0:34:39 Thomas: Man sure yeah oh yeah these aren't good people just just me but I just was was wondering if, is this a bastardization of a real thing or is this a new thing? Because I don't remember hearing about narco-terrorism before.

0:34:51 Liz: Well, that, it's like a little bit of, you know, a little calme, a lot of cambia. Like we designated FARC, which was the sort of major sort of Colombian cocaine trafficker and also political organization. We designated them as a foreign terror, FTO, foreign terrorist organization a number of years ago. This was before actually they made a deal with the Colombian government and everything worked out in 2016. But we did. And like, it's under the same kind of sort of stupid theory that they were harming the U.S. national security. They were absolutely causing destabilizing events in Colombia, but there was nothing.

0:35:07 Matt: And they were.

0:35:25 Liz: They weren't like blowing up courthouses in the U. S. Or killing members of the judiciary, you know, like it's just not. Yeah, yeah,

0:35:31 Matt: Not terrorism in the classic sense that they're trying to get any kind of change. They're trying make a lot of money and they're doing that very well. FARC was a far left terrorist organization. And I still represent plenty of people who are victims of FARC in Colombia and Venezuela for a while under Chavez did actively work with FARC and help them manufacture cocaine. So that is all true.

0:35:47 Liz: But to be clear, these people came to the U S because they would be safe in the US because it's not a foreign terrorist organization, in my view, from the perspective of the U S national security and interests.

0:35:53 Matt: That threatens us. Right. But I do want to just want to be clear that FARC is more of a political organization than anything we're going to talk about with Venezuela. So there have been a lot of questions about how this compares because, you know, we get the usual sort of comments of like, well, we're always doing this. This is normal. This ist just how the U .S. does things in the Western Hemisphere, which is true to a point. And certainly, as I've mentioned many times in this show, a lot my job is working with the victims of our empire for many, many decades now in Central America and Mexico and other places where we have interfered with governments, where we've spent a lot money and killed a lot people to make sure the governments we want are and power. That's more of the sort of the CIA soft power or direct military invasion kind of stuff. Nothing like exactly what we've seen has actually ever happened before. And the closest thing that people keep mentioning is, of course, Manuel Noriega in Panama.

0:36:38 Thomas: So what happened? Give us the details of that.

0:36:39 Matt: There was no argument whatsoever that Noriego was elected. He assumed power. He was a dictator. He wasn't a legitimate head of state in any other sense except that he was running the country. And he was a former CIA asset, and he was involved in narco-trafficking. We indicted him very much like what we did with the Maduro here. The difference is that they at some point killed a Marine and then declared war on us.

0:37:01 Matt: And Panama declaring war on us is, yeah, that is very different. That makes it a very different legal situation. Also, I will say, and I don't know, I was 10 years old when this all happened, so I didn't really have an opinion. I'm not sure how I feel about it now. But they were also threatening the Panama Canal, which is a real problem for global

0:37:02 Thomas: That seems different. You don't ever threaten the Panama Canal.

0:37:15 Matt: Shipping, right? That's right. Leave the canal on. So that makes it more of an international issue. You.

0:37:20 Thomas: Leave the canal alone. No, but fair. But that sounds very different. I didn't hear that. So they actually, someone declared a war on us because that seems very important. That seems like a key detail okay yeah

0:37:29 Matt: The Panamanian government, that is an important detail, right? So then we have a right to self -defense under UN Charter to, you know, if they declare war, we have a right to strike back. We invade, we go looking for him. He goes hiding in the Vatican's embassy. And if you want to go, just a weird detail, I don't know if this was on purpose or not, but he actually finally, after 10 days, gave himself up from the Vatican embassy on January 3rd of 1990, which of course was the day that we did all of this January 3rd with Maduro. I don'T if it's coincidence or not.

0:37:58 Thomas: Whoa I think it is because they were really waiting for the weather to be right and stuff so it sounds like just a

0:38:02 Matt: Oh yeah, that's true. They were saying it could be later too, but it's an interesting coincidence. And the most notable thing for me about the Noriega thing is that famously the Army's Psychological Operations Division blasted Noriego with 80s butt rock for days and days and day. Very, very loud speakers.

0:38:07 Thomas: Coincidence and no one deserves that

0:38:18 Matt: Honestly though, there's a playlist on Spotify that is, it's called the playlist that broke Manuel Norieaga. And it's great. I have to admit, it's really good. Not endorsing psychological warfare, but it is a fan. If you just want to have an 80s party? That's like three 80s parties. So good.

0:38:21 Thomas: Oh my oh my god jesus

0:38:31 Matt: But I also didn't realize though, until I went looking into this a little bit more, that they were also blasting this at the entire Vatican embassy.

0:38:31 Thomas: Christ oh

0:38:38 Matt: So I feel a little bad for those guys. They didn't deserve that.

0:38:40 Liz: This is this is not yeah

0:38:42 Matt: Yeah. They claim they never actually intended to give him asylum. They were just trying to help him surrender that he thought maybe he had a chance of having the Vatican help him out. It's a really interesting story about actually a female defense intelligence analyst who was actually responsible for finding his mistress and getting him to help. Anyway, there's a long story, but this is not the same thing for a lot of different reasons, but it's the closest thing.

0:39:00 Thomas: No that sounds entirely different

0:39:02 Matt: It does. It's the closest thing that we've done, though, in terms of invading a country and capturing a leader who eventually surrendered and bringing him back to the US to face an indictment. And then he was eventually extradited to France because he was also wanted for money laundering there. So again, complicated, but this is much simpler. This is much more obviously illegal in my perspective.

0:39:19 Thomas: I mean, just just on a on a normal regular person surface level, we don't enforce our laws on other countries. Right. I mean it's one thing is like we can indict people. I get it.

0:39:31 Thomas: We can, you know, but we don' t. No, I'm saying like we don''t go around the world finding everyone who's violated our law and bring them here is what I'm seeing. Like we don ''t. I guess enforce was the wrong language, but like that's not what countries typically do, is it?

0:39:31 Liz: Yeah well I

0:39:44 Thomas: If they come here, then then sure. Sure.

0:39:44 Liz: Mean the U .S. has done if anyone if anyone's done it the U。S. I don't know I mean I would say in the U.-S. tax context we absolutely do under FATCA well how it works under FACA is we go to any foreign banking institution that wants to have allow its customers to have U .С. securities and we tell them you need to identify anyone on your bank's books with U .S. indicia and send us this information. Otherwise they can't trade. And I mean, like otherwise. And that's and it's effectively like saying it's effectively imposing U.S. tax law abroad.

0:39:52 Thomas: Oh, interesting. Now, how does that work? Do we go capture people and take them here to? Sure. Interesting.

0:40:21 Liz: I mean that's the effect of it.

0:40:22 Thomas: Yeah. So but I mean, I'm making a difference between like police officers. The thing in movies was always, well, police officer, we got to the line. You're at the border at my jurisdiction ends here like that. And the reason being, I would think that like we obviously wouldn't be OK with that the other way. I don't want Iran to be saying that I violated their law for whatever Islamic thing I've done wrong. And then, you know, they can come kidnap me. It just seems like a very basic thing about international law and not at all dismissing the wrinkles there. And I think you could certainly make arguments about utilizing other... And to be fair, I think we were doing the equivalent of that probably under Maduro with sanctions and with that kind of thing. That would be like the equivalent to the banking thing maybe that you're saying, where it's like we might take other actions to try to use incentives, but we're not sending defending police officers is my point. We don't have police officers. Well, time to take a trip to Spain, police, you know, because there's somebody you got to arrest who jaywalked. And like, we just don't, that's just not normally how it works, right?

0:41:23 Matt: Well, what we have is extradition treaties and certainly not for jaywalking, but we work with that country and maybe the FBI does go over and to arrest them, but we work with their law enforcement, notify them, go and serve it and do it there and do it the right way. But this Bill Barr memo is saying the FBI has global jurisdiction to just go and grab anybody we want to anytime. This is why I'm saying this is such a dangerous precedent because really it's not that hard to get grand jury charges against foreign leaders. I mean, we'll talk about the foreign leader part, but high up people in other countries that we can allege have violated US law and corrupt dictatorships, right?

0:41:28 Liz: So

0:41:51 Thomas: Unbelievable.

0:41:52 Matt: If that's the precedent we're going to set, that you can just go to SDNY grand jury and just get charges and and then just go and bomb them and grab their generals or leaders or whatever. That's chaos. That's bad news.

0:42:00 Liz: Venezuela.

0:42:03 Matt: I did want to mention, speaking of, just to close the loop on this, Juan Orlando Hernandez Alvarado from Honduras was the former president when he was extradited. And he was lawfully extradated a few weeks after his term ended. He was absolutely involved with drug trafficking because his brother was a pretty well -known drug trafficker, Tony Hernandez. And he was rightfully tried and convicted. I mean, they certainly did ship a lot of drugs to the United States. It wasn't that hard to find jurisdiction there. But that's another one people have been comparing and obviously, but he's a right -wing leader in Honduras and Trump thought that he was real right or whatever. He was convinced by whatever letter that he wrote him that we talked about in a way a couple of months ago and pardon him. And he's going back, I guess. I don't know if he's gonna be able to run for office there. And He was a former leader at the time when he was indicted. So he was not certainly the person sitting as the head of state. So that brings us up to Venezuela. Liz, if you want to get into kind of what's been going on, there's quite a lot to catch up on in Venezuela.

0:42:53 Liz: Lots to say about the history of Venezuela. And so I'm going to keep this quite narrow in terms of kind of leading up to the present. But Venezuela has basically the world's largest oil reserves. Some of them are very difficult to get at. It also involves like a certain type of oil that's like quite difficult to refine, but there's a lot of oil in Venezuela and there still is. So, you know, you've got U .S. companies engaging in exploration in Venezuela, probably from like roughly the 1970s. I'm not going to really get into that history, but big event happens in 1999. What is that? Hugo Chavez, as part of the Bolivarian revolution, he's elected. What's kind of important about his election is, I mean, there is a lot of oil money in Venezuela. So there's attempts to kind of spread a more leftist ideology around different parts of Latin America. There's sort of various security concerns from the perspective of countries like the US, ostensibly. We're still coming out of the Cold War and that sort of stuff. And if you look at some of the stats, there are some arguments, some good arguments that Hugo Chavez, certainly in his early years, uplifts the average life of a like a Venezuelan person, like there absolutely are efforts to have better health care, education, things like that. I don't really want to get into that debate because like I'm not an expert there, but the stats say this.

0:44:14 Thomas: Yeah. Well it's so funny for where there's woke, I actually am realizing we covered this because Because it's a claim that conservatives like to make that, like, look at Venezuela. Here's what happened. They got leaders that tried to, like. Do social spending. And then they went bankrupt. And it's like, well, also their entire economy relied on oil.

0:44:31 Thomas: And the price of oil crashed. And that seems maybe more.

0:44:31 Matt: That'll

0:44:31 Liz: And also then we basically just sued them to death. And I mean, they got really stuck up in U .S. sanctions.

0:44:37 Thomas: Yeah. U .S. sanctions. Yeah. So maybe it wasn't that they wanted universal health care. Maybe we could actually do that here. And then that wouldn't happen to us.

0:44:46 Liz: No, it's just that's a really just I mean, that argument is just completely disingenuous on the side of conservatives. All right. So he gets elected in 1999. As I say, there's a number of U. S. oil companies he's engaging some operations there. In 2007, Venezuela basically says to not just the US companies there, but many foreign companies, you know, we're going to expropriate your oil assets unless you're going To restructure holdings in such a way where we give a majority share to PDVSA, which I will call because I am very familiar with them, we'll get there in a second PDVS. That's like what they the way the letters all sound in Spanish. So basically, if unless you're gonna give up unless you are an oil company, you're willing to restructure and give give a majority holding to PDVSA, you're out. So ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips are like, I don't want to restructure. Okay, I guess we're out, whereas Chevron's like, fine, we'll restructure, like, you know, you have this percentage, you can have a majority percentage, and like, we'll keep pumping oil.

0:45:41 Liz: That happens in 2007. This causes a whole series of international lawsuits. And I say this because I texted both Matt and Thomas before this show saying, surprise, I've sued Venezuela.

0:45:49 Thomas: Hey. Liz has sued Venezuela.

0:45:57 Liz: I know. Unfortunately, the more episodes we do, I may have to come clean with some of my cases from big law. But before I was a public defender, I worked in big law for about five and a half years. And one of the practices that I worked on involves a lot of international law, a lot of expropriation, which is dealing with an international arbitration, dealing with circumstances where a state is party to a treaty and they're alleged to have essentially expropriated or otherwise impaired the value of foreign investment. So I represented a company that was responsible for a lot of the pipes and pipelines that alleged that as part of this expropriation, their valuable pipes and pipelines were expropriated, which, I mean, they were. And they sued Venezuela in ICSID. ICSid is a court within the World Bank. And again, you have to be party to the relevant bilateral treaties of Venezuela at the time was. So anyway, that's my little Venezuela story. Oh, yeah, we absolutely won.

0:46:52 Thomas: Who won did you win liz won venezuela zero if anyone's keeping

0:46:57 Liz: Yeah, I know. Anyway, so this situation goes on for a while where, again, Chevron's the only US oil company essentially operating in Venezuela. You've got some other international operators, including China, which no doubt is also probably a motivation for Trump here. At various points, a bunch of sanctions, US sanctions get put on Venezuela. And also, let me just give you some like years in terms of like Maduro versus Chavez. So Chavez dies in 2013. Right before that, you've got Maduro being endorsed effectively as Chavez's successor. There's an election in 2013 where Maduro wins by two points. There are some concerns that this is not a fair election. There's really no investigation done into that further. And then sanctions to kind of start ramping up in 2017, the Trump department, the Treasury Department. I mean, let's just call a under Trump starts to sanction Maduro and barring U .S. citizens from dealing with them, again, except for Venezuela. Then in 2019, you get Maduro,

0:47:43 Thomas: Track it is under trump yeah wait sorry except for Venezuelan what

0:47:57 Liz: Except for, oh, sorry, I am really, except for

0:47:58 Thomas: Do you mean except for chevron

0:48:00 Liz: Chevron, except for Chevron. So that, yeah, so you've got basically, you know, U. S. citizens, U. R. S.-companies aren't supposed to deal with Venezuela from 2017, except of course Chevron gets their exception, which they have lobbied hard for. In 2019, you get Maduro sworn in for a second term. Pretty much no one recognizes that as a legitimate. The Organization of American States votes not to recognize the legitimacy. So like the actual organization representing many, you know, all these governments in South and Central America says we don't recognize this. Many worldwide governments don't recognise it. And it's worth noting that because one of the rationales that you're going to see for why sovereign immunity should not extend to Maduro is the U .S. is going to say we haven't recognized him as being president since 2019. So sorry, he doesn't get sovereign immunity. Things just start getting worse in Venezuela kind of in a sort of exponential way.

0:48:47 Thomas: Gotcha can I ask on that point then what is sovereign immunity in in that sense because it still wouldn't matter even if he had some sort of immunity or something sorry even if he doesn't have immunity he still doesn't know what to do and he doesn' t have immunity mean like when he's standing trial in new york which I can't wait to get to more of that that won't be like a defense oh it could be a defense

0:49:13 Matt: That Oh, it absolutely could be. I expect they'll raise it.

0:49:14 Liz: Well, well, they're they're going to stay. Well what I'm saying is that they won't. The response to it being the response to it being a defense which is the same thing they did which is for what it's worth the same thing that happened in Noriega's case. Noriego raised sovereign immunity as a defense, and it was rejected for a few reasons. But one of the reasons it was rejected was, well, the US doesn't recognize you as a sovereign.

0:49:18 Thomas: You're just oh you're saying trump is saying that's not a

0:49:22 Matt: Although

0:49:29 Thomas: Defense okay okay

0:49:37 Matt: It's a little messier with this one.

0:49:40 Liz: As to this particular issue, I don't know if I think it's much messier. I think you would just see the same set of arguments, more or less, saying, well the US hasn't recognized Maduro as a Sovereign since 2019. And there is, for what it's worth, precedent out of the 11th Circuit that seems to say that's OK.

0:49:43 Thomas: Interesting interesting

0:49:54 Matt: Yeah. No, and the courts will absolutely defer to whatever the State Department says about who is in charge of Venezuela. I'm just saying that there are a lot of countries around the world that still recognize him as the head of Venezuela, including Venezuela itself right now. And he was reelected in 2024. Not legitimately, I don't think, but he's been reelectED several times, unlike Noriega, who was never elected at all. So there is that.

0:50:13 Thomas: I feel like if maduro had done everything he did but as president of the united states wouldn't our supreme court say he this is official acts and we can't even get to you know I don't know all the details of the the indictment. Uh, but I guess, I guess I'm asking that question. And then I now, but now that you say the sovereign immunity thing, how does, how Does that work? Is it true that maybe he would have some sort of immunity if he were the, let's say it wasn't disputed and he was the leader, but he somehow still has an indictment and ends up in the U S let's Say in just alternate circumstances.

0:50:22 Liz: Yeah, totally. It's cool. All good.

0:50:46 Thomas: What kind of defense is that? What does that mean?

0:50:46 Matt: Yeah, that's a very clear defense at that point.

0:50:48 Thomas: He gets to do whatever. Well, of, of what and how much though, I Guess is, I don't know. Good.

0:50:52 Matt: So traditional international law, that you cannot prosecute the sitting head of another country. Yeah.

0:50:57 Thomas: Oh, at all for anything. Okay. Gotcha.

0:50:58 Matt: You can't just bring him in and do that. That's why I expect he's going to try to vigorously raise it. But maybe when we get to the indictment, we'll probably get into a little bit more about the legal issues there. But yeah, Liz, you were saying about... Yeah.

0:51:06 Liz: I'll just go on. So yes, you get so you get second term in 2019. Lots of people think that election is a fraud. And that's when you see a whole host of countries not recognizing him, including the US. There's a pretty significant report that comes out in 2022 from the UN talking about, you know, repression committed by Venezuelan security forces. I mean, again, Again, many, many. And this is the subject of a different podcast. Many, many allegations of extrajudicial killings, torture, disappearances of political opposition. Anyway, come January 2025, you get Maduro sworn in for his third term. And there were roughly five months of protests preceding this, allegations that protesters were fired upon, bad, bad stuff. And then now we're up to the present, which is in September 2025, when we start seeing these strikes on Venezuelan boats that are ostensibly containing, you know, cocaine being brought to the U .S. And that's sort of where we find ourselves. Yeah.

0:52:00 Matt: As of now, the US has not recognized anything but the National Assembly of Venezuela as the official government of Venezuela since 2015. So they just have refused to recognize, and that is important.

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0:52:13 Thomas: All right. Well, we're going to call it there. There's so much more to talk about in the second episode. By the way, patrons are getting that in a one big long episode at patreon.com slash law. For this feed, unfortunately, I do have obligations to the ad company to have a Monday, Wednesday, Friday release. So I do need to delay, but I'll try to, I'll post it a little early. No one, no one tell. I'll postpart to a bit early. I really do want this to get out to everyone as soon as possible, but I do need to have that Wednesday episode for ad obligations, so I'll put it out a bit early. I don't think it'll matter if I put it on, you know, maybe Tuesday sometime. We'll see what I can do. Bottom line is, I think this is just really good info, and I do really want to get it out there, and please share the show if you'd like to see more good coverage. If you'd like others to get real answers from real experts like Matt and Liz who aren't trying to appease some corporation that owns them. At least not until I acquire them with Thomas Corp. No, just kidding. All right. Thanks so much for listening. Seriously. And see you very soon for part two.