US forces have seized an oil tanker near Venezuela. Is this an act of war against Putin and Russia? Is President Trump putting them on notice? And what does the media have to do with all of this? Steve and Todd discuss it all on today s episode of War Room.
00:01:50.700Pete Hegseth, our great Secretary of War, that oversaw, once again, another precision military operation of incredible complexity.
00:01:59.220Now, we are going to have a writer from the Daily Telegraph on at 5 o'clock that's broken a story that has people's head exploding about meetings that took place in Qatar with the vice president down there in Venezuela.
00:02:13.400And she might have been kind of, how can I say this, maybe on the Trump team beforehand.
00:02:18.100He's going to walk through reporting he has that backs up that thesis.
00:02:22.940He put the story out and it's blowing up.
00:02:24.460Todd, but Pete Hegseth, who oversaw that, we had a quarantine and Rubio said, he says, look, the way we're going to do this is use our naval forces.
00:02:34.720We have, as President Trump says, a vast armada off the coast of Venezuela.
00:02:45.920I think there's 12,000 to 14,000 fleet Marines and sailors off there.
00:02:49.000We're going to use that smartly with the quarantine to leverage their oil policy and other things.
00:02:55.320And yesterday we redirected $2 billion, I think 50 million barrels of oil to the United States of America and away from the Chinese Communist Party.
00:03:08.900And in naval terms, as you know, that's an escalatory, that's bigger than a, that's bigger than a quarantine.
00:03:15.940At the same time, on the high seas, special operators, JSOC seized a, essentially a Russian vessel.
00:03:25.080And as you said, you believe that there are special operators on the vessel even before the helicopters came in.
00:03:32.120And a retired Air Force general has gotten to one of the war room engine room guys and saying, hey, tell Bannon and Todd, I think there's more than oil.
00:03:40.320It's kind of riding heavy in the light and seas.
00:03:42.620I'm thinking it's dropping off more than oil in various places.
00:03:45.520He believes there's something else on that ship.
00:04:30.180I mean, we're taking, it's the Monroe Doctrine.
00:04:31.860The Don Roe Doctrine, whatever you want to call it.
00:04:34.580But if you look at it from a bigger perspective, it may be a way to peace in Ukraine, right?
00:04:41.980If we can get Russia and at least out of Venezuela and other areas in the, in our hemisphere, then, you know, maybe there's a deal to be made in Ukraine for peace.
00:05:17.920We've got to make some time to do this in Paris yesterday in, in, in, in, in, I think Witkoff and, uh, and Jared are over there dealing with having meetings with the Syrians and the Israelis to, to bring, to get that thing settled down.
00:05:31.740Uh, Zelensky shows up, they got a sidebar meeting and, and they're in, and now here, not just about American security guarantees, but in the Germans were not there for the signing, but the French and the British have essentially signed an agreement with Zelensky.
00:05:45.860Now the Germans are not party to this.
00:05:48.180The Americans are not party to this, although they're leaking all kinds of information that we will be party toward to set up actual military hubs.
00:05:55.580I guess it's called of troops, not a, not a written security guarantee, not a contract, but true near the line of contact with wherever the, wherever the ceasefire is and wherever the Russian army is and wherever they agree, maybe they back up an inch, maybe they stay where they are, but wherever that line of contact, these military hubs will be up there with troops.
00:06:16.220With troops of France who can't afford it and the British who can't afford it, but this is what you're doing.
00:06:20.920How can you say you can see any peace deal coming out of this?
00:06:25.060Cause the Russians are not going to agree.
00:06:26.640They're not going to sit there and agree to have NATO troops, including, it looks like this thing is predicated upon the Americans coming in.
00:07:16.480Maybe there was nothing in it to begin with.
00:07:18.080Maybe it was supposed to be picking up oil.
00:07:19.900I don't know the specifics of the ship.
00:07:21.320But I do know that Trump is making it very clear of what his priorities are in this area of the world.
00:07:31.760They had expert after expert on last night.
00:07:34.360It was really sickening on CNN and MSNBC.
00:07:37.400And McFaul right there, in fact, in the cold open, we had that loud mouth that's been wrong on everything about Ukraine for almost, what, four years, three years?
00:07:56.320Greenland will be looked at to secure the Greenland-Iceland-UK gap, what we call it, that slot where Russian submarines would come out, both fast attack and boomers.
00:08:49.280Do you think the Russians are going to sit there and agree to get all their troops and all their support?
00:08:54.100Because Russia, in this regard, looks a little bit like a paper tiger.
00:08:58.660And China, the CCP, this is a huge loss of face.
00:09:02.060That's where they had their – I think the woman who's the interior minister, she came up today and lit us up and almost said it's an act of war what we're doing and taking their oil, sir.
00:09:11.960Yeah, Russia doesn't have the capability to fight us in this region, just like in Syria when they backed away.
00:10:19.920You know, I want to see that bridge between Russia and Alaska and lots of commerce going on there and an explosion of wealth in North America.
00:10:31.200Todd, there's a lot – you know, Tel Aviv, Levin, they're all getting worked up now.
00:10:34.540They want American interdiction with the Israelis, IDF, Mossad, into the situation of Persian.
00:10:39.860I'm saying, hey, the Persian people look right – and the Mullahs are firing on them.
00:10:43.280They're showing they have no regard to it, the people out there, because the economy is in total collapse, as I said it was going to be, if you just enforce the sanctions.
00:10:49.960Now, the biggest one is not being enforced, and that is doing the same thing, you know, straight to Hormuz that we're doing off the coast of Venezuela.
00:11:01.240And I've been there in those carrier battle groups.
00:11:03.740It's so blocked up when they come out, you can shut it down right there.
00:11:08.960Should we be doing – shutting off the Mullahs of their biggest cash flow, like we've shut off the Venezuelans from their biggest cash flow of the regime there, by just interdicting – start with a quarantine.
00:11:21.060If you've got to go up the escalatory ladder to a blockade, but no oil comes out from the Mullahs, no cash comes from the Chinese Communist Party.
00:11:27.840Because if you cut off Venezuela and you cut off the Persian oil for the CCP, there's not going to be a lot of big talk about what they're going to do in Taiwan, sir.
00:13:18.280So we got Comer's Oversight Committee.
00:13:23.720We've got there's a presser starting here momentarily with Caroline Levitt in the press briefing room and Bobby Kennedy and Brooke Rollins are going to be there.
00:13:33.220So we have agriculture and Bobby Kennedy.
00:13:36.580That's make America healthy again using both the food and the pharmaceutical, right?
00:13:43.100Bobby Kennedy is doing such a great job there.
00:13:44.940Big announcement the other day on vaccines.
00:13:54.280And five o'clock and take a broader view and drill down about exactly what is going on in all in particularly in NATO and Europe, Russia, the complete meltdown as President Trump tries to basically build the construct of hemispheric defense.
00:14:10.680He's, he's, he's, he's been very upfront.
00:14:16.020He studied closely the debacle of Iraq and he is sworn to not allow those things to happen again.
00:14:27.120And I think if you look at what's happening, it's very smart, particularly the CCP on their back foot right now.
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00:23:58.280Let's now go to the White House and briefing room.
00:24:02.360The Trump administration took strong action to bar hospitals from performing dangerous, irreversible, life-altering transgender procedures on children.
00:24:13.040The Trump administration announced funding awards to states through the Rural Health Transformation Program,
00:24:19.340an unprecedented $50 billion investment established under President Trump's one big, beautiful bill.
00:24:25.780The Trump administration has also worked with 18 states across the country to ban junk food purchases using SNAP benefits starting this year.
00:24:35.080And thank you for leading that effort, Secretary Rollins.
00:24:37.920Additionally, President Trump took historic action to secure most favored nation drug pricing
00:24:44.060and secured deals with major pharmaceutical companies to massively lower the cost of prescription drugs.
00:24:51.280And those effects are being implemented as we speak.
00:24:55.080Americans are going to continue to see the result of these incredible deals the president cut.
00:24:59.720And I know President Trump and this team behind me worked incredibly hard to lower those drug costs for Americans.
00:25:05.800On Monday, the CDC adopted common sense updates to America's childhood vaccination schedule based solely on the gold standard of science.
00:25:15.060This action empowers parents and physicians to make the best individualized decisions to protect our children,
00:25:21.800while also restoring much-needed confidence in our public health system.
00:25:26.420And as a Maha mom myself, I'm very grateful for that.