Judging Freedom - Aaron Maté : Why Trump Wants Venezuelan Regime Change.

Episode Date: December 3, 2025

Aaron Maté : Why Trump Wants Venezuelan Regime Change.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Thank you. Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for judging freedom. Today is Wednesday, December 3rd, 2025. Aaron Mote joins us now. My dear friend, Aaron, thank you very much. I want to explore your rather substantial knowledge of Venezuela. But before we do, what do you think is being accomplished or was accomplished by a five-hour meeting yesterday between President Putin, and Donald Trump's former business partner and current son-in-law in Moscow. One result was that a planned meeting with Zelensky and Wyckhoff and Kushner was canceled. Rather than go meet with Zelenskyy, Wickhoff and Kushner just flew back to the U.S. I'm not sure why that is, but perhaps, and I'm just speculating here, that reflects the fact that despite all the talk about the initials, 28-point peace plan that was leaked being a Russian document, that for that, for Russia, while they're willing to talk about some issues, that document does not meet their minimum needs.

For example, trying to have a Ukrainian army at a size far bigger than what Russia and Ukraine negotiated back in Istanbul three years ago, and leaving it sort of still fungible as to whether the territory that Russia has claimed as its own. the Dombos will be recognized internationally. For Russia, I think they're taking a very hard line, given the fact that Ukraine chose to walk away from a much more advantageous peace deal for everybody three years ago. And so now, despite all the talk that, you know,

Wickhoff was already giving Russia everything it wanted, that could be one of the main obstacles here is that Russia and the U.S. are still far apart. And where were Sergei Lavrov and Marco Rubio? Well, they were not there. That's for sure. They're not there. Marker Rubio seems to have been demoted across multiple files. He was not even slated to go attend a very important NATO meeting this week. He's not even going to that. But despite that thing, a very comfortable forum for him. So it seems as a term I know is handed off all the major responsibility to Wickhoff, except, unfortunately, on Venezuela, where, as I'm sure we'll discuss, Rubio's agenda is still driving the show. Right. Before we get to Venezuela, I want you to watch President Putin. You may have seen this, but I'd like you to see it here, yesterday, right before meeting with Steve Wetkopf and Jared Kushner, very, very interesting, both defiant, warm, and self-confident. Not both, but all three, comments about, does Europe really want to take us on? Chris, cut number two. 12 we are not planning to go to war with europe i've said that a hundred times already but if europe

suddenly wants to go to war with us and starts it we are ready right now there can be no doubt about that the only question is in what way if europe suddenly starts a war with us i think it will be over very quickly this isn't ukraine with ukraine we're acting in a surgical careful manner right so that Well, you get it, right? The body language, surgical, moving his hand as if to mimic a surgeon with a scalpel, the self-confidence, the smiles, and the war would be over quickly. What is he talking about? I think he's talking from the perspective of someone who just doesn't take Europe seriously anymore. They've made themselves totally irrelevant, the European leaders who insist on no,

compromise with Russia, who keep talking as if Ukraine is going to win the war. They're living in a complete fantasy land without any means to back it up to the point where, look, their big plan for continuing the proxy war was to formalize the theft of stolen Russian or frozen Russian assets. But Belgium, where most of those assets are held, it said, forget it. And then there was talk about, okay, some new fund. But European states have also just said that they're not going to be able to come up with the money to back it up. So Europe is all talk and why? Why have they chosen to dig themselves this whole of taking a totally uncompromising stance

of encouraging Ukraine to fight a war that it can't win, to fight a war that Europe has no interest in participating in, to make themselves even more dependent on the U.S., to spend even more money on military spending and guiding social programs, which are causing unrest. You need a degree in psychology to understand the mentality of some of these European leaders. I think Putin is mocking that from that place of appropriate condescension. Did he threaten to use nuclear weapons on London, Paris, and Berlin? I think, I mean, yeah, you could read the comments that way, but I think that was in the context of if they insist on making war on Russia. As some European leaders have been talking about recently,

the French general who recently said that our children have to be prepared to die in a war with Russia. There have been repeated statements like this over several years now. We're called Theresa May saying that if we have to go to nuclear war with Russia, we will. This has become the norm. And so Putin is just reminding people of the consequences of their words. And one thing I think he's highlighting is that these words are completely bankrupt because they have no intention of actually fighting a word. against Russia. Is there any moral or a legal basis that you can argue for the United States

killing 81 boat people on the high seas in the Caribbean, 1,500 miles from the U.S.? The only basis is to feed the ego of people in Washington who revel and who enjoy killing people. Let's assume all these people were running drugs. There's no evidence they were running drugs to the U.S. These boats can't reach the U.S. And even if they were running drugs, even to the U.S., we'd have no right to kill them. So this is part of a sort of declaration of lawlessness that the U.S. doesn't have to follow the rules. And there's a long record of that that predates the Trump administration. And it's part of a regime change campaign against Venezuela. The hope is that these strikes will show that the U.S. is prepared to use force.

prepared to kill people randomly at will in the hopes that will lead to the collapse of the Venezuelan government so far in that front that action item is not is not panning out what does Trump truly want why yesterday did he say we're considering a land invasion or he didn't use the word invasion but attacking the land of Venezuela as if attacking the land from the land which would mean an invasion. He wants to overthrow the government of Venezuela, and he's hoping that all this talk of a land invasion, along with the very real show of force that he has deployed, the huge military assets that he sent to the region. That will lead to the implosion of the Venezuelan government from within. He wants regime change without having to send in troops, which I think for him would

be extremely difficult, given that he sort of shaped part of this political identity around being against endless wars and against deploying U.S. military forces abroad. He was hoping to finish to accomplish the job in his first term by imposing crippling sanctions that destroyed Venezuela's economy as the opposition economist Francisco Rodriguez spoke to you about on your show a few weeks ago. And now he's ramping that up by sending U.S. military assets to the region, killing people in the high seas, and issuing threats, hoping that that will lead to a collapse. But in Venezuela, unfortunately, for people who want regime change, you still have a faction of the country that is very loyal to the government that doesn't want the hegemon of the world dictating to them who should lead their state.

And so you're seeing so far a loyal army around Maduro. And what's the reason for the regime change other than Marco Rubio has been dreaming about this since his Cuban grandparents told him? well I mean there's so many factors first of all if you can collapse this major state that has practiced some policies you can call socialism although it's not anywhere near an actual totally socialist state there's a very there's a huge there's still a huge capitalist element which Venezuela is the tractors in Washington always omit but if you go to if you go to Venezuela you'll see capitalism very much in action the wealthy neighborhoods have plenty of for example stores at which they can buy

their luxury goods. It's just, it's just crush the threat of a bad example. This has always been U.S. policy. If there can be one state that has some policies that redistribute the wealth to the lower classes as Venezuela has tried to do with their oil wealth, then that could infect the whole region and give people the wrong idea of a different form of government than the one that the U.S. is traditionally trying to oppose, where it's just the elites in societies that we align with that do well.

So the threat of a bad example, crushing that, making the economy scream as Henry Kissinger said he would about Chile, when Chile had a similar kind of government that was targeted for regime change. And also because Venezuela, because of its oil wealth, it can help prop up governments in Cuba and Nicaragua, which the U.S. has also been trying to overthrow. And finally, as a bonus, if you overthrow the government in Caracas, you get their oil. And as Trump has said, as some of the biggest cheerleaders of this regime change campaign have said, Venezuela has the biggest oil reserves in the world. And so as a bonus, you get access to that. Plus, the very valuable minerals that Venezuela has in its territory. He could probably have access to the oil by paying for it. He could.

I know. Venezuela would totally do business with the U.S. And they've tried to many times over the years. But the problem is that's not enough for people in Washington who not only demand the right to profit and plunder. But also, states as important as those will have to be under U.S. control. And if they're outside of the U.S. hegemonic order, for example, if they have friendly ties with Iran and China and Russia, all countries that the U.S. is said to be our adversaries, then they can't exist. You know, if we can control them, that's what we're going to do. This is just what the U.S. has done for so long, and it doesn't matter who's in power.

Barack Obama, it was his administration, that first declared Venezuela to be a national security threat. How was Venezuela a national security threat to the U.S.? No one bothered to explain, but the message was simple, because they're not under the control of U.S. hegemony. They're a threat, and therefore they have to go. I want to get back to Pete Hague, Seth, and the boat strikes. Where do you see this going? Here's a lot of Republicans are exacerbated by it because of his shifting explanations

and because of now his efforts to blame Admiral Bradley. Yes. So Hagsath has taken the heat for the fact that after one of these strikes on these boats, there were some survivors clinging to the wreckage. And an order was given to kill the survivors, which they did. and Admiral Bradley's taking the heat. And yeah, for some Republicans, this goes too far. And especially with the timing of this, a scandal emerging,

just as Trump has pardoned a narco trafficker, Juan Orlando Hernandez, the former president of Honduras, who bragged about stuffing the drugs up the gringo's noses, accepted bribes from the drug campaign Kingpin El Chapo made millions of dollars for the cartels. Trump gave him a pardon just as he's waging this regime change campaign in Venezuela and assassinating people in the high seas under the guise of fighting drug trafficking. It's just it's it's it would be funny if it wasn't so cynical and so disastrous and so deadly.

So but for Republicans, I guess for some some of them, this has just gone too far. And so they're finally asking questions now that this revelation of a follow-up strike on survivors of an initial illegal strike has emerged. The president of Honduras was convicted of facilitating the movement of 400 tons of cocaine into the United States, and as you said, was boasting about it. Let's go back to Pete Hegseth. Here's Senator Randpole, obviously not happy about Hegs Seth's shifting explanations. Chris, cut number 13. In this sense, it looks to me like they're trying to pin the blame on somebody else and not them. There's a very distinct statement that was said on Sunday.

Secretary Hegseth said he had no knowledge of this and it did not happen. It was fake news. It didn't happen. And then the next day from the podium with the White House are saying, did happen. So either he was lying to us on Sunday or he's incompetent and didn't know what had happened. Do we think there's any chance that on Sunday, the secretary of the defense, did not know there had been a second strike? First, he said, I didn't order a second strike. Then the White House said he did. Then he tried to say, you know, I couldn't see there was too much

smoke and fire going on. Chris, the Fox and Friends clip where he states defiantly and clearly that he saw everything. I watched it live. We knew exactly who was in that boat. We knew exactly what they were doing. Those 11 drug traffickers are no longer with us sending a very clear signal that this is an activity. The United States is not going to tolerate. It won't stop in with just this strike, anyone else trafficking in those waters who we know as a designated narco-terrorist will face the same fate. And it's important for the American people to protect our homeland and protect our hemisphere. What we have there in the Caribbean is a clear demonstration of military might. So Nicholas Maduro, as he considers whether or not he wants

to continue to be a narco-trafficker, has some decisions to make. And that's all I'll say about. So it's a gleeful grasp of the attack before he knew that the media would report, Washington Post says it has seven sources, there must be the people in the chain of command, that he ordered General or Admiral Bradley to kill the two survivors. uniform code of military justice says people survive who are shipwrecked who are injured you have a duty to save them to rescue them instead he ordered them killed or gave an order such that his next in command the admiral ordered them killed says it's the admiral's fault but supports what the admiral did where is this going to go yeah I mean like what he claims is so he saw the initial strike and then he didn't stick around for when his forces followed up and killed the survivors.

Okay, so he left the room. But then, you know, as Rand Paul said, are we really expected to believe he wasn't told? Oh, by the way, Mr. Secretary, after you left, we killed more people. That didn't make his way to him. That just defies a reason. Look, I don't know where this is going. It depends if how much spine the Senate Republicans will have here.

It's such an egregious scandal, especially at a time and just to underscore how absurd this is at a time when Trump just pardoned a convicted narco trafficker who had flooded, who had helped flood the U.S. with the very same poison that Trump claims that he wants to fight and killing people in the high seas and having regime change in Venezuela. I mean, if you told me this a few weeks ago that just as Trump was launching this regime change campaign and assassination campaign in the name of fighting drugs, that he would pardon a convicted narco trafficker who was sentenced to, you know, decades in prison, I wouldn't believe it. I just wouldn't believe the impunity and the hubris, but I guess you can never count anything out in this administration. So it'll be very interesting to see where all this goes. Here's Pete Hagseth in 2016. talking about the duty to disobey illegal orders. Chris, cut number 17.

There are some guys at Leavenworth who made really bad choices on the battlefield. And I do think there have to be consequences for abject war crimes. If you're doing something that is just completely unlawful and ruthless, then there is a consequence for that. That's why the military said it won't follow

unlawful orders from their commander-in-chief. There's a standard. There's an ethos. There's a bold. belief that we are above what so many things that our enemies or others would do. First, the commander-in-chief at the time he said that was Barack Obama. Of course. Yeah, of course. Now that he's in power, the rules don't apply. And this move to blame the lower-ranking officer who supposedly oversaw the strike.

This is the classic playbook. If you go back to so many scandals over the years, Milai Massacre, Iran Contra, Abu Ghraib torture. Everything is always blamed on the lower level officers. It never rises to the top when it comes to accountability. So Hegsaith is just following in that tradition. I'm going to read, Chris, if you put that back up, Heg Seth's tweet. Let's make one thing crystal clear.

Admiral Mitch Bradley is an American hero, a true professional, and has my 100% support. I stand by him and the combat decisions he has made on the September 2 mission and all others since America is fortunate to have such men protecting us. When this Department of War says we have the back of our warriors, we mean it. Translation, he made the decision to murder the two guys that were clinging for their very lives on the broken part of the boat I did. Then, of course, he posted this thing.

Franklin the Turtle I don't know if you can read the small print of top for your Christmas wish list so he's suggesting to children that at Christmas time their wish list should be killing people this is sick I mean the one thing about this administration

I think sets them apart from previous ones is they're so open in their celebration of their own corruption and just cynicism. I mean, for example, when they ordered the kidnapping of that Palestinian student, Mahmoud Khalil, they tweeted out a picture of him saying, you know, Shalom Mahmood, making fun of him as he was sent to a prison just before his wife was set to give birth to their first child. Just at a recent cabinet meeting this week, the second, the second, the second,

Secretary of Agriculture, Brooke Rollins, she bragged about how the fact that, whereas Biden increased food stamp spending by 40%, the Trump administration continues to roll that back, and she said that she's filled with gratitude and joy. So something about this administration, they're certainly, and I guess there's something to appreciate here because they don't hide it. They're very open in celebrating their sadism. nicely put Aaron thank you very much for your time i know you're traveling and appreciate it all safe travels we'll look forward to seeing you next week thank you judge go see you welcome coming up today at two o'clock this afternoon from syria our man in syria kevork almasian at three o'clock this afternoon phil geraldi at 3.45 a special because he's already been on with us this week with our dear friend Scott Ritter, Pete Hagseth, the self-made war criminal, 345 this afternoon Eastern. Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom. Thank you.