Judging Freedom - Max Blumenthal : Why War With Venezuela Is Unjust.

Episode Date: December 17, 2025

Max Blumenthal : Why War With Venezuela Is Unjust.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 17th, 2025. My dear friend, Max Blumenthal, joins us now. Max, thank you for being here. Thanks for accommodating my schedule. A couple of topics to get to. Let's start with Venezuela.

Wasn't the seizure of the enormous Venezuelan tanker filled with oil in the high seized by the U.S. military, an act of piracy? Well, it was actually filled with fentanyl. That's what I thought. If you listen to the president, that's what he'll claim. That was standing what his own drug enforcement administration says about Venezuela, which is basically a clean bill. Seems like an act of piracy to everyone who's paying attention, who knows what piracy is. And it wouldn't have been the first act of piracy and outright theft by the U.S. regime of Venezuelan assets. The U.S. regime used a arcane alter ego legal mechanism to steal Venezuela's most profitable international asset in Citgo,

just completely stole it and then plundered the money to fund the coup-plotting Venezuelan opposition. Nicholas Maduro's personal airliner was stolen by the Biden administration. And now Trump is announcing a complete blockade of Venezuela, which is an act of war, and the theft of Venezuelan oil from tankers, which he says are sanctioned or illegal. And you have the kind of spook community claiming some kind of legitimacy to this action and asserting, actually an expert said this in Reuters, that when the U.S. does it, it's not piracy. and to call it piracy is merely rhetoric. But the idea that this is legitimate is based on the U.S. sanctioning during the first Trump administration, Venezuela's entire oil sector. So now Trump has come forward with an announcement

that this is the policy going forward to steal Venezuelan oil because he claims that Venezuela, in a true social post, he said Venezuela has stolen our oil and land, as though Venezuela actually belongs to the United States, and by being a sovereign nation, they are stealing from us. What is he talking about Venezuela has stolen our oil and our land? He claims the United States government owns the land of Venezuela. Yes, that's that's what that's one of the points that he's making, which even ferocious, puchist members of the right-wing Venezuelan opposition

who are close to Maria Corina Machado are a little bit embarrassed about because he's taking their regime change plot to its logical conclusion, which is that the U.S. will control Venezuela completely and steal its land and resources, as the United States has traditionally done to other Latin American countries.

And remember when Trump's close ally, Lindsey Graham said Venezuela should be the 51st century. state. This is the thinking that animates Trump's policy. And so Trump is also admitted this has nothing to do with drugs. And you know who else admitted this? Susie Wiles in a very candid and revealing and now embarrassing interview with Vanity Fair. She said, Trump wants to keep on blowing up boats until Maduro cries uncle. And people way smarter than me say that he will. So it's actually about regime change. And then if you read deeper into Trump's statement on truth social, he's classifying fentanyl as a weapon of mass destruction, even though Venezuela doesn't

produce any fentanyl. And this means that actually the Sackler family are terrorists. He's using this as the WMD justification for the whole policy of theft, plunder, and regime change. As they continue to blow up boats on the fake drug war justification, killing civilians who, I have no due process. Chris, now I have to read the truth social that you and Max and I discussed before we went on air. Is this the very one you sent me in the email? Okay. This is the president of the United States.

Venezuela is completely surrounded by the largest armada ever amassed in the history of South America. It will only get bigger. And the shock to them will be like nothing they have ever seen before until such time as they return to the. United States of America, here you go, Max, all the oil land and other assets that they previously stole from us. The illegitimate Maduro regime is using oil from these stolen oil fields to finance themselves, drug terrorism, human trafficking, murder, and kidnapping. For the theft of our assets and many other reasons, including terrorism, drug smuggling, and human trafficking, the Venezuelan regime has been designated a foreign terrorist organization. Therefore, today I am ordering a

total and complete blockade of all sanctioned oil tankers going into and out of Venezuela. The illegal aliens and criminals that the Maduro regime has sent to the United States during the week and inept Biden administration are being returned to Venezuela at a rapid pace. America will not allow criminals, terrorists, or other countries to rob, threaten, or harm our nation, and likewise will not allow a hostile regime to take our oil, land, or other assets, all of which must be returned to the United States immediately. Thank you for your attention to this matter. Donald Day, Trump, these are the ravings of a madman. There's no evidence for any of this. No, there isn't. I mean, the only force that he seems more hostile to in the Western

Hemisphere is Rob Reiner. This is a deeply deranged individual who is being, having his strings pulled by a zealous, ideologically extreme fifth column in South Florida that is obsessed with regime change. And the foreign terrorist organization authorization is designed to completely skirt Congress and invalidate the Constitution to legitimize this policy. And it's based on absolutely nothing. Venezuela does not threaten the United States in any way, but it's also a designation that was slapped on Cuba to justify indefinitely embargoing and strangling Cuba's economy, and Biden refused to undo that policy. So an act of war is being declared by Donald Trump. When you blockade a country unilaterally and announce a complete cordon sanitaire or

around the country's borders so that no resources can go in or out, you are declaring war on that country. And now the Trump administration is seeking a pretext for a straightforward military conflict with Venezuela that will have disastrous consequences. If you want to talk about human trafficking, narco cartels, it will unleash civil war. I mentioned before there was this war game

back in 2019 overseen by someone named Douglas Farah, who appears to be some U.S. intelligence asset, very closely aligned with the neo-conservative camp, had produced many papers for Western intelligence-aligned think tanks like the Institute for National Security Studies on how to do regime change in Venezuela. So he's not exactly someone who's in my corner on this issue. And he determined that in a U.S. war with Venezuela, would unleash a conflict with no end and no possible means of stopping the conflict, something that would be like the Colombian Civil War on steroids. So you hear these characters like Elliot Abrams or the former U.S. fake ambassador to Venezuela, James Story. They're out there

promoting this lie that Venezuela is not like Libya or Iraq at all. You don't have these sectarian religious divides. This society has a history of democracy, but they completely ignore the Colombian example in which the U.S. unleashed a civil war through its interventions and meddling starting in the 1950s. Well, doesn't China buy most of its oil from Venezuela? They probably have a reserve. What happens when they need oil and Trump won't let ships get through the Panama Canal? Well, that's a great question. I mean, Venezuela, China gets a lot of oil from Iran as well and China's assisting Iran through infrastructure. They may be selling anti-aircraft weapons and helping Iran on various other financial levels.

When I was in Iran, I saw that all the construction equipment was from China. Their future was heavily propelled by China, but Venezuela is far away. And that's partly why Trump is behaving so aggressively to Venezuela. Russia's pinned down in Ukraine. And both China and Russia watched as Syria fell. There may have been very little it could do, but Russia had to redeploy many of its strategic bombers and forces that it was using to protect Syria from regime change back to its own front lines to defend against Ukraine's onslaught.

So this is a moment of opportunity for the Trump-Rubio-Click, especially the Rubio-Click. What can Russia or China do? Russia, I think two or three years ago, actually sent a couple of strategic bombers all the way from Moscow to Caracas in a message to Washington that it would defend Venezuela against regime change. But it has sent no such message that I've seen since Trump initiated this unprecedented show of force.

And I think that's what's needed right now is a very public message. Here's a public tweet from then Congresswoman and now his Director of National Intelligence, Tulsa Gabbard. This is January 2019. The United States needs to stay out of Venezuela. Let the Venezuelan people determine their future. We don't want other countries to choose our leaders, so we have to stop trying to choose theirs. Boy, that is about a sound and rational and consistent.

a statement as I've heard. I wonder if she still feels that way, Max. Well, I know Tucker Carlson's coming on next and you should ask him about this. He might have more insight than I do. What I think these Tulsi Gabbard statements show and exemplify is the corruption of a wing of our national security elite that actually knows better, that knows the truth that we are elucidating right now, but has agreed to sublimate their own views and repress their knowledge to fuel their own ambition. And I think that is why so many are so enraged with Tulsi Gabbard kind of holding the line.

At the same time, I don't know what is happening inside the Trump administration, but I've heard from various sources that there is a fight taking place over Venezuela, and that Trump. Trump is constantly wavering. And I would assume Tulsi Gabbard is on the side of those who are the non-interventionists. The question is, what kind of power does she have when you have someone like Susie Wiles

as chief of staff who keeps Tulsi Gabbard and her team out of any important national security-related meeting, just as she did during the 12-day war with Iran, where she made sure that the CIA chief, John Ratcliffe, known as the Mossad stenographer, was constantly in the a room with Trump feeding him Mossade intelligence, it feels like the same dynamic as at play where Rubio is controlling everything Trump sees and hears about Venezuela and the Tulsi faction is frozen out. This is a brilliant analysis of the dysfunctional government that we have right now. They're probably whispering into his ear that nickname that he despises Taco. Trump often chickens out or Trump always chickens out, something like that because there's no greater insult for him than to think that he chickens out.

But he has no basic principles, no set of values. It is almost literally whoever is in whispering in his ear last is determining what he's doing. Does anybody take seriously the allegations that Nicholas Maduro. is the head of a drug cartel masquerading as the president of Venezuela? Does anybody take that seriously? Does even Lindsey Graham believe that? Nobody believes that. I mean, with Susie Wiles' comments to Vanity Fair,

with Trump's Truth's Social Post, if you follow any of the leaders of the Gusano Industrial Complex, like representatives Maria Alvira Salazar or Carlos Jimenez, who are helping drive this policy, they always mention drugs as an afterthought. And it's all about either political control, geopolitics, or in Trump's case, oil. I mean, we're talking about $1.7 trillion in oil reserves at a time when global capitalism is in crisis. And Donald Trump is ushering in a new era without institutions, without the mirage of a rules-based order.

It is simply turn-of-the-century high colonial era gangster capitalism with Palantir levels of command and control. And that's what Trump is doing to Venezuela. Let's switch gears, Max, to this remarkable document that you and I have reviewed, which was filed either yesterday or earlier today by Julian Assange accusing the Nobel Peace Prize people of committing crimes. What is this all about? Indeed. It's remarkable. It's an explosive document, and it took someone with the integrity and credibility of Assange who was effectively tortured, persecuted and hounded and smeared for a decade by the U.S. regime as a political prisoner to call out Maria Karina Machado, and it took a mind like Assange's to analyze the rules and structure.

of the Swedish and Norwegian Nobel Committee and Nobel Prize process in countries that in a country Sweden primarily that participated heavily in his persecution to produce this kind of explosive legal brief accusing the Nobel Committee of Crimes. They have violated their own stated rules on who is eligible for the Nobel Prize. The rules require that these are people who oppose the increase in standing armies who are campaigning for peace and who are pushing diplomacy. And Maria Carina Machado contravenes all of those rules in the most explicit unprecedented way in Nobel history, with the possible exception of Theodore Roosevelt, who was granted the Nobel Prize despite his warmongering in the Western Hemisphere. And the

Nobel Committee on its own website says that it gave that prize to Theodore Roosevelt to curry favor with Washington because the Scandinavians were hungry for soft power. They're doing it with Maria Karina Machado, a veteran coup plotter who is actually called on Netanyahu and Israel to invade Venezuela to install her into power. They're doing that with her for the same reason. And who nominated her for the prize? It was Marco Rubio, the U.S. Secretary of State. So clearly this is about soft power, but as we illustrate White Reed and myself in our analysis that we published at the Gray Zone, there are also serious conflicts of interest between the Nobel Prize Committee and the Venezuelan opposition that I can explain in a minute.

But Assange nails the committee for violating its own rules, as well as violating the Rome Statute, which created the International Criminal Court. The Rome Statute is enshrined in to Swedish domestic law and Sweden's foreign ministry claims to take seriously the Rome statute. Everything Maria Karina Machado has done and is doing violates the Rome statute and has already initiated and enacted war crimes in the Caribbean with the killing of over 100 civilians in strikes on boats, including double-tap strikes. So the committee members need to be interrogated, they need to be investigated, and this award must not be given because it is illegal according to the laws of the country, the countries that are giving it.

Once again, the institutions have no credibility. The rules-based order is unmasked for everyone to see. It's a continuation of the Gaza genocide illustrating how hollow this transatlantic liberal international order is, and it's all perfectly distilled into the United States. this legal brief authored by Julian Assange. What happens now? I mean, is this the functional equivalent of a criminal complaint? Is somebody going to be charged with violating Swedish law? It's a criminal complaint that needs to be examined by Swedish judiciary authorities. And if they throw it out, it means that they're throwing out their own laws and their own

regard for the Rome statute that they claim to hold so dear. So that's that's the choice that Julian Assange has presented them. It's also the choice they made by giving the Nobel Prize to a warmonger and coup plotter who is involved presently in war crimes in the Caribbean, who has never presided over any kind of peace treaty as Henry Kissinger, for example, did. And you could say, well, Barack Obama didn't deserve the Nobel Prize either. It was a farce, for sure. But Obama had not yet presided over war crimes because he had given to him at the inception of his presidency. Before we end, let's just go back to Venezuela.

What do you think will happen next? Is he going to make some announcement tonight about an invasion, or is tonight going to be some twisted understanding of the bad economic news that came out? yesterday. I'd expect a lot of bluster about Maduro, a lot of WMD level bluster that the American public has already rejected and will continue to reject. I expect that the more he bluster is about Venezuela, the more his approval rating will tumble further below 40%. And that if Trump is wise, he'll try to change the subject because he has lost his luster and he has stumbled into George W. Bush level territory here really feels like it's been a long year,

and I can't believe we're going to have three more years of this. It could lead us to a very dark place. My views precisely, Max. Max, I know you're traveling and I deeply appreciate you being on with this. Next week is a short week because of Christmas. I hope you can go back with us one more time before the year is out. My best of you and your family. I'll see you then. Thank you, much. Thank you. Coming up at 11 o'clock this morning,

my one-hour live interview with Tucker Carlson. At 1 o'clock this afternoon, Colonel Douglas McGregor, at 3 o'clock, Phil Giraldi. Judge Napolitano for judging freedom. Thank you.