134. Has Trump's Administration Committed War Crimes?

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Hello and welcome to The Rest is Politics US with me, Catty Kay, very full of turkey still, I'm afraid. A little sleepy from my turkey.
All right. Well, you look great, Katy.
I mean,

for those of you that are listening on the podcast, as opposed to YouTube, she's in a fashionable sports jacket, I guess.

Sports jacket. Only men wear sports jackets.
Women never wear sports jackets. What is it, a blazer? I don't know.
I think a blazer. Okay, I'm in my standard-issue t-shirt,

feeling pretty good today.

How is Disney World? You know, for me, it's always a lot of fun.

The excitement that my kids have at that place makes it all worth it for me. Did anyone throw up on the rides? No, nobody throws up, Cat.
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 Hagseth, 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.

And 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. We will be at the South Bank Centre on the 6th of September.

Sounds like a lot of fun, Caddy.

I've already got it in my schedule. You can sign up at the RestisPoliticsUS.com, become a founding member, and then you'll get that pre-order link email 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, Caddy, 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. Well, 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.

And 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?

So 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 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?

I 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.

And 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. You're supposed to be picked up and made a prisoner of war.

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 airst covering project, Caddy, to try to, you know, not blame each other or Hexeth Hexeth will blame Bradley, Frank Bradley, the Admiral, or vice versa.

But, you know, 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.

So no one's been convicted. I want to point that out.
Okay. 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 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.

I'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 um 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 you knew people were in the water did you know people were in the water that's the video shows it yeah and so so you you thought it was smart to to strike them not pick them up before you cleared the debris and so the answer is well we used to be the Americans.

We 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 be real MAGA for a second, okay? Because you know I have real MAGA people of 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 115 miles an hour.
They're heading north. They've been on watch.

My friend Katty Kay 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.

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.

That's where they are now, by the way. I mean, they're now over the edge.
This is where Ram Paul, I mean,

let me just see. Rand, are you under here, Rand? Because I got to look for Ram because I feel like Ram Paul is like becoming my spirit animal because I'm in agreement with Ram 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.

Can I just, 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.
He's he who died from alcoholism.

He's always been very opposed to drugs. So that begs the question of where, 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 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 messaging around Venezuela is incredibly mixed at the moment. And 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 the 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, going, 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. And 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.

I'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 lips 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.

There is not much love loss, 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.

I 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 what Trump does.

He puts the guy, 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, Cat.

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, he wouldn't. I was wondering that.
Yeah, he wouldn't take him. He's, oh, he's that close to Vance.
F him. That sort of thing.

But, you know, 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.

He 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.

It looks like the vice president of that country would probably get that post.

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 army takes over Venezuela.

Katy, 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 I'm going to get in trouble for saying this, but I don't mind saying it. Trump'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.

Whenever 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, you know, 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 with Maduro. The papers are reporting that he told Maduro, you got to leave.
You 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, Caddy.
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 of 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.

But 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.

It'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 6.

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.

And 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, Caddy, 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. Number one, pro-U.S.
or technocratic government replaces Maduro. That's my prediction.
At least that's what the administration wants.

You'll see Chevron, Exxon, Conoco, Phillips, et cetera, come back in force into Venezuela. That would ramp up production.
Right now, Venezuela is 750,000 barrels a day.

This would put production back into the 1.5 to 2.5 million barrels within three years. Now, this would crush the leverage that Russia and Saudi Arabia has on OPEC, right?

And so 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.

The flip side is

what I think you and I have seen before.

You could have the Libyan scenario where there's an absolute chaos, shuts down the production, and then you see criminal groups and militia fiefdoms surge, and then oil prices go the other way.

You could have a $20 to $40 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, call that regime change.

We went from a corrupt Iraqi government with Saddam Hussein to now a corrupt Iraqi government, which has got Iranian militias all over the country.

So who the hell knows what will happen here?

But I mean, there's no great track record for the U.S. 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 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 Hexeth, 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.

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 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.

And 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.

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Welcome back to The Rest is Politics US.

Okay, it was a very nice Thanksgiving weekend with my family in Washington, D.C., but I'm going to be honest, here in the nation's capital, it was also quite a sad weekend.

And that was because a National Guards woman from

West Virginia was shot and died of the wounds.

She was shot the evening before Thanksgiving and then died over the holiday. And

we really felt it in the city, Anthony. I mean, it's very, where it happened was very, it was just a couple of blocks from the White House, about a mile from my house.

We've all got accustomed to the National Guards men and women wandering around the city, kind of looking more like tourists.

I mean, it's become almost a bit of a city joke, but not to the members of the national guard themselves who had become reportedly increasingly anxious about their own security and then on wednesday an afghan who had come out during the evacuation had been working for the cia in afghanistan in special forces operations the kinds of operations where they were using afghans alongside american cia agents to go in and actually kill people in villages and to kill reported militants, but I understand lots of civilians were also killed in these attacks.

This guy, who had been granted asylum in April, drove from Washington State where he left his family, came to Washington, D.C.,

and targeted these two, came out on its I know the block very well. He came out from one side.
He's brandishing his gun.

These two National Guardsmen are in front of him, and he shoots at both of them.

Andrew Wolfe, who is 24, who is critically wounded and still fighting for his life. Sarah Beckstrom, who's only 20, and she died of the wounds.

Tragic in and of itself.

And then the reaction to this from the Department of Homeland Security, from the people in the White House who want to restrict immigration, from the President himself, has been to...

for the moment, pause all asylum applications, all immigration applications

for all of the Afghan refugees who came out of Afghanistan when the Americans pulled out in that chaotic exodus.

I have, I think I've mentioned on the program, we had a young woman who was a journalist in Afghanistan who lived with us for three years who came out in that exodus by herself.

Her asylum has been approved. She's waiting for her green card application.
She knows, along with all of her friends, that this will now mean at best that the process gets delayed

a year or two.

They are hoping, at worst, I guess they could all be sent back to Afghanistan where women are basically confined to the house, can't work, can't raise their voices in public, can't be educated after the age of 12.

So it's a pretty grim situation for the Afghans.

But politically, this has given the anti-immigrant forces, led by people like Stephen Miller, and that the president himself seems to sign on to, an opportunity to really crack down once again, to tighten the screws once again on people who are in the country legally and people who are in the country illegally and people who want to come into the country.

So I think we're in for a kind of pretty chilled period around immigration in the country. What was your reaction to

what happened over the weekend? I mean, listen, obviously great sadness,

but as usual in this country right now, it turns from great sadness and tragedy, another shooting happening, to a political football caddy.

And so there are six members of the Congress, Democratic members of the Congress, that put out a statement, including Senator Mark Kelly, basically saying that you cannot accept an illegal order from the President of the United States or the Secretary of Defense.

And of course, President Trump said, you guys are now

seditious. You guys are now traitors to suggest something like this.

And now the Department of Defense, Department of War, whatever you want to call it, is now going after Senator Kelly and others, suggesting, at least

Senator Kelly, who's a member of the military, that there should be a tribunal and a potential court-martial.

So to me, it's a terrible tragedy.

But what we're doing in the age of Trump, we're taking a terrible tragedy, and we're going to exponentially make it worse by breaking societal norms and interrupting the process of free speech.

So, Katie, do you think a member of the military

should accept an illegal order from the President of the United States? I mean, that's the first thing that you learn in the American military is to obey the Constitution and the system,

not a person. How does that relate to the National Guardsmen and the crackdown on immigration?

It relates to the National Guardsmen because the MAGA people are now saying that you incited this violence.

You've got people believing that the National Guardsmen are out there doing something illegal, and a result of which it incited violence and caused a shooting.

That's the Marigan narrative. If you watch Fox News and you watch the political pundits on Fox News, I do watch it because I need to understand the Maggin narrative.

I don't really understand that because then their argument must be that Donald Trump is wrong to be sending the National Guards into the cities, right?

They're saying that Donald Trump is right, but the hard left, which of course Mark Kelly is not part of the hard left, but I'm just going to give you their narrative.

The hard left is suggesting that the deployment of the National Guard is illegal and these people should not be obeying Donald Trump's narrative.

And they're claiming that this is inciting violence. Now, there's a lot of hypocrisy to this statement, by the way, because then they're also saying, well, this is a rogue,

illegal immigrant that got in due to the laxity of the Biden administration.

But I just want to point out to people that when you're in the MAGA world, it's like an Alice in Wonderland kaleidoscope of ideas that are swirling around. Where everything is used to justify.

Exactly. And they all center on hate, racism, xenophobia, of course.

You know, as we talked about in our first episode, Part of the problem with what's happening here is that the arguments are getting contorted and becoming conflicting, right? You've got,

we're shooting the drug boats, but we're pardoning the drug kingpin. So those two things are slightly in conflict, right? Okay, but that, but I can explain that because that's Trump's narcissism.

Okay, Trump is trying to tell you that there are no norms. Trump has said this repeatedly.
The policies of this administration are whatever I want them to be.

And since I'm a full-on narcissist, I'm going to make your head spin. You're my supporter.
I'm going to do two things that are contrary to each other. And I'm going to need you to go woof-woof

and say, yes, I'm in support of those two contrary things. I think what's the interesting fallout from this is going to be,

first of all, the guardsman was here legally, not illegally. So that's a kind of flaw in the argument that

he should have been picked up because he was here illegally. He was actually here legally.

And there is an amazing video, by the way, guys, which you should watch on the New York Times. It's a 10-minute video, but worth every minute of it, of three people who were in the country legally.

One is a green card holder. One was the immigration officers for an extension to her visa.
One had had his asylum approved.

They are all picked up and detained by ICE and put in really horrific conditions in cells with 30 people, a kind of hole in the ground to pee in, a sort of public toilet, and they have to pee in front of everybody.

One woman who's having her period and there is blood everywhere.

They don't give them good food, I I mean, or enough food, it's freezing cold, they're calling them the ice blocks, and they're held until they're suddenly released and told, okay, you're free to go.

We I guess they should never have been picked up in the first place.

So I think it's very clear to make this distinction between the people who are all of the people who are here under different circumstances. This man, this shooter,

Afghan, was here

in the country legally.

But it you look at even the Wall Street Journal, which ran an opinions piece the next day saying the alleged shooting of an an Afghan partner shouldn't condemn all who assisted the United States and now live here in the country legally.

So not only is that, does that apply to Afghans, I think it's just if Stephen Miller had his way and had the crackdown on immigration, skilled and unskilled, that Stephen Miller would like to see that we

talked about in our series on him.

If you are not a founding member, become a founding member and then you can listen to the series. That was just a little public health announcement.
Then it's not going to help the American economy.

It's not going to help America to actually devoid.

You're now hearing members of the MAGA community and even the Secretary of Homeland Security talking about remigration, sending people in the country who here have green cards, looking at denaturalizing people.

I remember Anthony so clearly before the election, you and I said, well, if he starts doing this, pulling mothers. from school lines.
Mothers are being pulled out of school drop-off lines.

ICE agents are smashing the car window, dragging the mother out as she's about to drop her child off at school. I don't see how that's going to be good for the country.

I mean, just in pure economic terms, how that's going to be good for the country. It's not good for the country.
It has a chilling effect on innovation. We know there's lots of studies on that.

But again, I want to go down the Alice in Wonderland storyline here for a second because I want to just show the absurdity of all this.

So while all of that's going on, there are judges that are saying you can't do certain things. Okay, so in March, one of the judges, okay,

basically said that the Alien Enemies Act that's being used to push these deportations, the judge by the name of James Boesberg, he basically said you can't do that.

You have to stop these flights and halt the deportations. So despite that order, Christy Nomas said, no, we're going to continue to do it anyway.

Now, she's getting air cover from the Department of Justice. They're contending that the action was lawful and not in contempt of court, but the judge is still pushing the contempt of court.

But she's in direct violation, and so is the administration of a court order, Caddy. Now, the administration will say, well, yeah, but

the Supreme Court said that the student loans, this revocation of the student loans, Supreme Court said that you can't do that. Biden administration said, no problem, we're doing it anyway.

So they're going to create this, you know, what about ism and this both sides issue. But she's directly defying a court order.

And then she goes on television this weekend and she says, We're here to fight activist judges. But you know, Caddy, she's got huge legal exposure.

I'm not her lawyer, but if I was her lawyer, I pick up the phone and say, Okay, listen, I know Donald Trump is your orange god, and I know you're going to be subservient to him, but he's going to be gone from the game.

And you know, it's going to protect you? You don't have his secretary, no.

You do not have his presidential immunity. And the next administration, it comes in, you know, Jamie Diamond gave a brilliant interview, which I've watched three times now.

He's being interviewed. He's on CNN.
The reporter is saying to him, Are you going to give money for the ballroom? He says, no, I'm not giving money for the ballroom.

Why aren't you giving money for the ballroom? He says, well, the next administration could look at the money that's going to the ballroom as a corruption.

And I'm not going to be brought in under potential corruption charges by the next administration. So we're pinging and ponging here now, Caddy, in terms of what's going on.
And to me,

it's terrible because I submit to you that we don't have a strong enough leader that's going to come in and transform this thing. and be Mandela-like.

I predict that the Democrats are going to take Trump's playbook and say, oh, you rammed this down our throat. Well, guess what we're going to do to you? We're going to ram it down your throat.

I agree. I think that's what's going to happen.

But I think all of this is an indication, as we've been saying over the last couple of weeks, that people are starting to look over the parapet and think, oh, there is going to be a future.

And if you are Christy Noam, as you said, having gone on television this weekend and basically said, yes, I was the person who ordered those planes to fly in defiance of a judge's order, because the judge is an activist judge, that doesn't put you in a great legal position.

And she's going to have to answer at some point, I guess. This is going to be full, here you go, here's our prediction, full employment time for lawyers in Washington, D.C.
What's new in this city?

If you are a lawyer, you are in for a lot of business coming your way.

We started this half with one sad story about Thanksgiving weekend.

I'm going to, I hate to be a downer, but I want to tell you the other story that came up over the weekend that I do think is worth talking about. And this is a young woman.
She's 19 years old.

Her name is Annie Lucia Lopez-Belozza. She's been in the United States since the age of seven.
She's studying in Babson College in Massachusetts.

And this weekend, for Thanksgiving weekend, her parents, who live in Austin, Texas, her dad's employer very sweetly offered to bring her home as a surprise.

He arranged for her to fly home and paid for the ticket. She arrives at the airport in Boston, Massachusetts, and is told that there is something wrong with her ticket.

And can she see a customer service representative? She goes to the customer service desk and is suddenly surrounded by ICE agents.

She is put in shackles on her hands, waist and ankles, flown to a detention center in Texas and then flown on to Honduras, which is where she left at the age of seven.

And she did not know that there was some kind of deportation order out for her. She should have been informed of this.

And she went to the airport in order to surprise her parents for Thanksgiving weekend. She is now out of the country.
I think

part of the reason that Donald Trump's approval ratings amongst independent voters on the issue of immigration, he has an approval rating that is sinking on immigration amongst independent voters, the people who decide elections.

I think

Annie Lopez-Belosa story is part of that reason. This is not what Americans signed up for.
I find the whole thing to be reprehensible,

but it's not big enough yet, Caddy. Yes, approval ratings are down.
Hispanic community is now below 30%. I think they're in the mid-20s.

Voted massively against Donald Trump in Virginia and New Jersey. Yeah, exactly.
And so, but it's not big enough yet, Caddy.

And so a couple of more stories like the one that you just rendered, it'll get big enough and there'll be a groundswell that will take these guys out.

I do believe that because I think that this is completely reprehensible.

And you know what happens when it happens in your, it's no big deal when it's not in your community, but when it happens in your community, it becomes a big deal.

And the Trump people are being very indiscriminate now in terms of who they're going after. Yeah.

What does the employer of Annie's father who paid for that ticket and arranged to have her come down for the weekend, what does he think? What does everyone else in that company think?

What does everyone else in that community think when they hear that story?

When it's close to you, you feel it a lot more than when it's on the other side of the country, but it's starting to get close to almost everybody now. Okay, that's all for today.

We'll be back on Thursday, of course, with another episode of news. But in the meantime, do sign up to hear the second episode of our series on Jeffrey Epstein, which comes out on Wednesday.

Just head to therestispoliticsus.com to sign up. We are expecting the release of those files any day now.
It's all been signed. They should be starting to come out.

We'll start getting the details from them. There's going to be a lot of people who are nervous on both the Republican and the Democratic side.
Here is a clip from episode two.

And of course, this does connect into the current president of the United States, who was also president of the United States in July of 2019 when Jeff Epstein.

Let's just say that he died. Okay.
So what I'd like to say here is this is the duality of Donald Trump.

Because just these are facts, Caddy. This is just facts I'll state.
They hang out together. They hang out together in the 80s and the 90s.

Trump himself proudly, and I lifted the quote, I've known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy.
He likes beautiful women as much as I do, many of them on the younger side.

That's New York Magazine 2002, Caddy. That's not Trump running for president.
That's Trump the social light in New York. Okay, and of course, this quote is like aged uranium, right?

It's still tagging Trump. Okay, he makes more, he makes more admissions because Trump is the great confessor.
Okay, he goes to Palm Beach billionaire parties with him.

He's a nightlife player with him in New York. I'm not again, I'm not saying he did anything illegal.
He sends him a drawing of a naked woman in his birthday. Yeah, he denies that that's him.

He denies that that's him. The Wall Street Journal gets that from the Epstein estate.
But Trump then starts shifting the story. Okay, this is the masterful nature of Trump's deflection.

He goes from terrific guy

to barely knew him. Okay, and when he wants to disassociate himself from something, I barely know who the Project 2025 people are.
Excuse me, J.D. Vance wrote the forward.
Your OMD director wrote it.

Barely know the guys. Okay, so this is the interesting thing.
And then he says that he banned Epstein from Mar-a-Lago, but by the way, that was never documented.

They went back to 2019 and quote-unquote documented it. He then says he wasn't a fan.

And what's interesting is he's super tight with the guy, publicly praises Epstein Donald Trump, and now he's totally disassociated from him.

And I think this is an interesting thing about how politicians, frankly, can survive scandal. You know, what they can't survive is truth.
They can't survive a smoking gun.

But Trump has enough of a hold over his base that all the smoke that he puts out after the fact

has allowed him to stay away from something, at least up until now, Caddy, that's too damaging to the president. It's damaging him.

And Epstein, by the way, there's a great email from Epstein that just got released.

It says, if people knew what I knew about Donald Trump, I am so surprised, effectively, and paraphrase him, I'm so surprised that he's still politically valuable.

He describes him as dirty. If Jeffrey Epstein did not kill himself in prison, if he didn't take his own life, who did it?

Hope you enjoyed that clip. To hear the full series, head over to the restispoliticsus.com and sign up now.

Thanks for listening, everybody.

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