Triggered - Donald Trump Jr - How the Cartels Launder Billions and Inflict Terror, Interview with Marshall Billingslea | Triggered Ep.325

00:06:22.000 Hey guys, welcome to another huge episode of Triggered.

00:06:25.000 I hope you're all having a great start to the week.

00:06:28.000 Big show for you today.

00:06:29.000 Today, we're sitting down with a first-time guest, Marshall Billingsley.

00:06:34.000 In the first Trump term, he was the guy in charge of hunting terrorist financing all over the world.

00:06:40.000 He ran the office of terrorist financing at the Treasury Department.

00:06:44.000 And we are getting into all of that today.

00:06:46.000 We're talking about the cartels, the Chinese money laundering networks that are literally bankrolling the fentanyl crisis, Iran's terror finance machine, the Monroe Doctrine, and what comes next. 0.54

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00:08:31.000 First, check out all the latest predictions on polymarket.

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00:09:10.000 Joining me now is former Assistant Secretary at the Treasury Department for Terrorist Financing, Marshall Billings Lee.

00:09:17.000 Marshall, thanks for joining the program.

00:09:18.000 Really appreciate it.

00:09:19.000 It's great to be with you.

00:09:20.000 Thanks for having me on.

00:09:22.000 So, you ran the office at Treasury that tracks terrorist money, criminal finance, you know, all over the world.

00:09:29.000 Can you briefly introduce yourself to the audience so they have an understanding of what we're talking about here, since this is a fairly relevant thing over all the news we've gotten over the last few months?

00:09:39.000 Sure.

00:09:40.000 So, after 9-11 and the results of the investigation, the commission investigation into the breakdown, the intelligence failures to see all of the al-Qaeda money moving into the country, Congress enacted a law which created, among many other things, my office, which I held under President Trump in the first administration, which is the Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Terrorist Financing and Financial Crimes.

00:10:06.000 The purpose of that office is to both set the anti-money laundering policies for the United States government, but it's also the operational sort of tip of the spear for the Treasury in terms of working with foreign governments to disrupt terrorist financing and proliferation financing at the source.

00:10:24.000 There are other parts of the Treasury, such as the Office of Foreign Asset Control, which work in the same organization that are responsible for sanctions.

00:10:33.000 We have FinCEN, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, which is our financial intelligence unit that monitors suspicious activity reporting by the banks.

00:10:42.000 And then we have an intelligence shop.

00:10:44.000 So, I worked hand in glove with those other organizations underneath the Undersecretary.

00:10:50.000 And, of course, Venezuela was a main focus of ours in the first administration, as was Iran.

00:10:57.000 So, I mean, obviously, regarding, you know, Venezuela and really a lot of Latin America with the narco-trafficking going on. 0.91

00:11:04.000 I mean, this administration obviously designated the Sinaloa Cartel, CJNG, the Cartel de la Solas, and others as foreign terrorist organizations.

00:11:15.000 You know, record numbers of sanctions have been done in a single year.

00:11:18.000 And we're using some of these same tools against Hezbollah and the IRGC, and I'm sure Boca Haram, amongst others.

00:11:26.000 You know, for people watching at home, you know, why do these designations really matter?

00:11:30.000 You know, sometimes, you know, people say, oh, they're just calling them that, but they're not actually doing it.

00:11:34.000 What can we do to cartel money now that perhaps we couldn't do before they were actually designated as terrorist organizations?

00:11:43.000 Quite a bit.

00:11:44.000 The decision, and it's long overdue, the decision to designate the cartels in Latin America as foreign terrorist organizations enables a number of things.

00:11:54.000 But most importantly, it opens up the possibility for the United States to conduct covert action or direct action with special forces and SEALs against these organizations.

00:12:05.000 So you add a kinetic option on the table, which goes along with the financial disruptions.

00:12:13.000 So when you designate these organizations and you make clear who exactly within the organization is designated, you basically freeze them out of the international financial system.

00:12:23.000 So it becomes very difficult for these people to get bank accounts, very difficult for them to get credit cards.

00:12:30.000 You really complicate not only the financial structure of their organization, but their own personal finances too.

00:12:37.000 I mean, can they just simply assign a straw man to that and these people are under penalty of death that someone else can just do it?

00:12:46.000 Or are the numbers just so big that you can't just say, hey, we got 10 bank accounts, it doesn't matter.

00:12:50.000 I mean, the volume of transaction, the size of the transactions, where those things are being done just sort of signals to the treasury that this is obviously a nefarious activity.

00:12:59.000 They do set up straw men all the time. 0.83

00:13:01.000 And there are a number of jurisdictions, especially in Latin America.

00:13:04.000 Here I would focus on Panama, for instance, that serve as home for shell companies that are created to both help evade U.S. sanctions and obfuscate ownership, whether it's ownership in real estate or in yachts or private planes or all the kinds of things that we see the narcos liking to spend their money on.

00:13:26.000 But they also use these front companies for their business activities as well.

00:13:31.000 So you are in a constant state of hunting these shell companies down, exposing them, disrupting them.

00:13:39.000 They'll shut them down and they'll open new ones sometimes in the same jurisdiction, sometimes within hours.

00:13:46.000 But that doesn't mean that you give up trying.

00:13:49.000 You continually pursue them to the ends of the earth.

00:13:52.000 So, you know, obviously a lot of talk about Panama and places like that.

00:13:55.000 I mean, you know, there seems to be a lot more outreach as of now.

00:13:59.000 You saw Shield of the Americas coming up last week, working with a lot of these Latin American jurisdictions to combat the narco-trafficking.

00:14:08.000 Panama, obviously, America seems to have a pretty good shot at getting the canal and at least control thereof.

00:14:15.000 Is it just the way these systems are working or is there government entanglement in some of these Latin American countries that are just allowing this to happen because they're happy to have the money flow through them and they're punching their fees and whatever it may be?

00:14:26.000 100% government entanglement in many cases.

00:14:29.000 You have major conflicts of interest.

00:14:31.000 In Panama, you have members of the government who themselves ran or were significant partners in the very law firms that were establishing shell companies.

00:14:41.000 So you get a fair amount of that.

00:14:42.000 You also get drug money is just absolutely corrupting.

00:14:48.000 And so the cocaine-related money coming out of both Colombia and Venezuela, you've got that plus heroin and obviously the methamphetamines and all of that coming out of Mexico.

00:15:04.000 That all just gradually and sometimes very rapidly erodes the rule of law.

00:15:11.000 It's just corrosive.

00:15:13.000 I mean, the one I think of the most in that one is obviously Mexico.

00:15:18.000 You saw, I think it was 33 of the 35 people who ran for president the last time around were essentially killed by the cartels.

00:15:26.000 That tells me that the other two that made it probably didn't get lucky.

00:15:31.000 They just have an understanding.

00:15:34.000 Can you even be in government on a high level in some of these countries right now and be against the cartel?

00:15:39.000 Certainly in Mexico, it doesn't seem like it to me.

00:15:42.000 It's certainly a risky proposition, but there are, and I worked very closely with the Mexican government in the first Trump administration.

00:15:49.000 We at the Treasury have and still have a really rock-solid relationship with what they call hacienda, which is their treasury.

00:15:58.000 And really good people there trying to do the right thing.

00:16:01.000 But when you hit those senior levels in the government, and if you're going after the cartels, you have put a bullseye on you and your family.

00:16:09.000 Yeah, I guess there's no real limits to what they'll ultimately do.

00:16:13.000 So with that sort of in mind, how much can Treasury, as long as they're able to operate in those places, how do you make that stopgap to really put on as much pain as possible?

00:16:23.000 So make their lives as difficult as possible, prevent as much of the human trafficking and drug trafficking as possible.

00:16:30.000 From the Treasury standpoint, obviously there's the kinetic options and those, hopefully, I've been a believer because I don't know, frankly, what's more of a clear and present danger to the United States of America than fentanyl that kills 100,000 Americans every year.

00:16:44.000 How do you do that to have the greatest efficacy in stopping all of the neofarious activities that they're doing?

00:16:52.000 So some of it is reciprocal intelligence exchange.

00:16:56.000 So you go down, you meet with, in my case, with the internal security service and their financial intelligence unit in Mexico and with Hacienda, and you give them as much classified information as the U.S. government and the intelligence community is comfortable sharing.

00:17:13.000 But ideally, it's enough that points them in the direction of whatever the bad activity is that you're trying to get them to disrupt.

00:17:22.000 There are a number of other operational relationships that Treasury tried to facilitate unsuccessfully, frankly, with AMLO while he was in power in Mexico.

00:17:33.000 I'll give you just two examples.

00:17:35.000 One is, you know, we really need the Mexicans to work with us on judicial wiretaps to enable law enforcement to gather the necessary information to mount prosecutions. 0.98

00:17:49.000 Another, and they really were not at all helpful on that.

00:17:53.000 They also were not helpful in terms of doing bulk cash delivery by DEA and others.

00:18:00.000 The relationship with DEA was pretty fractured.

00:18:02.000 And under Biden, I mean, DEA fell apart under Biden.

00:18:06.000 It just, he destroyed that agency.

00:18:09.000 Morale is in the middle of the year.

00:18:10.000 Amongst others.

00:18:12.000 Yeah, right.

00:18:13.000 And in particular, they just were not even being allowed to operate in Mexico.

00:18:19.000 So I believe that this time around, President Trump has put quite a bit of pressure on Shinebaum to play ball.

00:18:27.000 And clearly they are.

00:18:29.000 I mean, they've done renditions for us of key individuals.

00:18:36.000 They just killed a major narco leader a few days ago.

00:18:40.000 So they are stepping up, but they're only stepping up because the pressure that the president is applying to them.

00:18:47.000 So, I mean, I guess a big component that I think of when I think of the Mexican drug cartels is obviously the link to China and ultimately Chinese money laundering networks that are basically now the bank for the Mexican drug cartels.

00:18:47.000 Yeah.

00:19:00.000 You investigated these kinds of hidden facts, you know, financial structures for years.

00:19:04.000 How does it work?

00:19:06.000 And where do we hit it when you have that kind of cross-border collaboration in the narco world? 0.79

00:19:14.000 The Chinese money laundering aspect.

00:19:17.000 So China plays in the fentanyl trade with the Mexicans in three different ways.

00:19:21.000 The first is that they sell precursor chemicals.

00:19:26.000 In fact, nowadays, because the Mexicans have gotten so sophisticated, they're selling precursors to the precursors to make the fentanyl, which makes it really hard to track because these are everyday industrial use chemicals in a lot of cases. 0.99

00:19:39.000 The second thing the Chinese have done is they've provided the chemists to the cartels who have instructed them and trained them on how to actually make this weapon of mass destruction, which is what it is. 0.96

00:19:51.000 And the third thing, which is incredibly difficult to crack, is they perform a third-party money laundering function.

00:20:00.000 So here's how it works in the U.S.

00:20:02.000 The fentanyl comes across the border, it gets sold, and whatever narco structure here, usually Mexicans that's making the sale, will collect up the dollars, the physical banknotes, and the Chinese will come in and get that from them periodically. 0.91

00:20:18.000 And then they will do what they call smurfing, which is they'll bring that money into banks in small amounts below the suspicious activity reporting thresholds.

00:20:27.000 And they'll move those into accounts.

00:20:29.000 And they'll then sweep all that together into a couple of large accounts with lots, you know, millions of dollars.

00:20:36.000 But that's where the money sits.

00:20:37.000 It sits in the bank.

00:20:39.000 It doesn't anymore transit outside of the United States.

00:20:42.000 It just stays there.

00:20:43.000 Because what happens on the other end is the same third-party money laundering operation will approach people, high net worth people in China who want to get their money out from communist China because communist China has capital controls, right?

00:20:59.000 So you can't move dollars out of the country very easily.

00:21:03.000 And they will sell those people, the U.S. bank accounts, in exchange for Chinese currency for Yuan.

00:21:11.000 And so the high net worth person will put money in a bank account in Yuan, and in exchange, they get control through whoever they deputize here in the United States of the accounts here in the U.S.

00:21:23.000 Then the cartel will use that money that's parked in China in the Chinese currency to buy the precursor chemicals and other stuff to send back to the cartel.

00:21:34.000 That is one of the most elaborate and one of the hardest to break money laundering operations associated with the drug trade.

00:21:44.000 Yeah, I mean, it's incredibly sophisticated.

00:21:48.000 I mean, that's no joke.

00:21:50.000 Yeah, it makes sense.

00:21:50.000 I mean, you know, one of the big things is a lot of obviously Chinese money that wants to get out of there.

00:21:54.000 So, I mean, I guess some of these Chinese nationals, they're sort of unwitting participants in even this.

00:21:59.000 They're just happy to get money out of China, so to speak.

00:22:02.000 Or are they sort of inextricably linked to the cartels and or the CCP, whoever's doing this over in China?

00:22:10.000 You know, they're breaking Chinese law for sure, right? 0.99

00:22:13.000 Because they are deliberately evading the capital controls, not that we care particularly.

00:22:18.000 You know, the extent to which these people do or don't know or probably should reasonably suspect that the source of the funding is drugs, I don't think they care, to be honest.

00:22:27.000 Yeah.

00:22:27.000 No, well, I imagine if you, yeah, if you're under the constraints that you have there and you can park some money in a safe hold, you go on a vacation, you probably never come back.

00:22:34.000 I'm sure we'd give them citizenship for no real reason whatsoever. 1.00

00:22:39.000 You're one of our neighbors to the north or southwood and here we go.

00:22:42.000 Right.

00:22:43.000 Well, when you live in communist China and Xi Jinping has a habit of disappearing millionaires and billionaires overnight, I do think that successful business people do live in fear of being snatched up in some one of these random purges.

00:22:58.000 So I can understand why they're looking for a safe haven to get the money out to park it maybe under their kids or their extended family, buy some property in the U.S., that kind of stuff.

00:23:07.000 I mean, wouldn't the way to track that?

00:23:08.000 I mean, obviously there's got to be some sort of change in control in that bank account if all of a sudden new people have access.

00:23:13.000 And so, you know, is that not the way to monitor that from the treasury standpoint where you could actually see where this is likely happening?

00:23:19.000 Or is it just so vast and so spread out and it's just too random to track?

00:23:24.000 I think there are TELs that allow the Treasury and the Treasury is actively working on this.

00:23:31.000 And I've spoken with the new team under this administration.

00:23:34.000 Very good team, very strong team that is working for the president now.

00:23:39.000 So they're on it.

00:23:41.000 But I think really where you break the case wide open is when DEA gets in there and flips some of these money launderers, catches them at a stash house, at a cash house, and you start to get inside the organization and you destroy it from the inside out.

00:23:58.000 It's hard to do it from the outside in at the bank level.

00:24:01.000 That makes sense.

00:24:01.000 I mean, I guess we've also seen, you know, this administration is basically saying hostile foreign powers, China, Iran, Russia, you know, have no business operating in our hemisphere.

00:24:11.000 You know, that's the Monroe Doctrine, or maybe they call it the Donroad Doctrine these days.

00:24:16.000 You know, can you talk about the framework for Latin America and how it ties to our foreign policy in other parts of the world?

00:24:22.000 Obviously, everyone understands, hey, Venezuela, the reason Iran and China and Russia were into it was because of the oil.

00:24:30.000 They didn't need the fishing.

00:24:31.000 They didn't need the other things.

00:24:32.000 It was always because of the oil.

00:24:35.000 Talk about how that network is intertwined.

00:24:38.000 So the Monroe Doctrine is actually a fascinating little excursion, which I won't dwell on too much, but there basically have been two philosophical approaches to the Monroe Doctrine.

00:24:52.000 When James Monroe actually posited the doctrine originally, it was an isolationist doctrine, right?

00:24:59.000 Everybody focused on the fact that it said, European powers, you stay out of our hemisphere.

00:25:04.000 But the quid pro quo was a commitment for the United States to stay out of European affairs.

00:25:10.000 So it was an effort to kind of create a sphere of influence to keep the Europeans out. 0.92

00:25:15.000 And that persisted under John Quincy Adams and several subsequent presidents.

00:25:20.000 But then Theodore Roosevelt came in and looked at it and took a really very different interpretation.

00:25:27.000 He had a corollary as well.

00:25:29.000 And his corollary and President Trump's corollary are very similar.

00:25:33.000 And basically, it's a much more assertive form of the doctrine that says we are going to actively project and protect our interests in the region, and we will not tolerate foreign powers coming in.

00:25:46.000 So, you know, for Theodore Roosevelt, those foreign powers were the Spanish and others.

00:25:51.000 I mean, he actually sent warships to force the Colombians to give up the canal zone to us in the first place, and so on and so forth.

00:26:00.000 Ronald Reagan continued the application of that same doctrine, and President Trump's approach has been the same.

00:26:09.000 But the adversaries are now different, right?

00:26:12.000 So it's no longer the Europeans we worry about.

00:26:14.000 It is, as you mentioned, the Russians and the Chinese.

00:26:16.000 And they, I will tell you, they were in Venezuela full bore.

00:26:21.000 Yeah, my understanding is, you know, at least the accounts that I've read, you know, that a lot of the missile defense systems and the satellite systems that were there guarding against Maduro's capture were actually Russian and Chinese.

00:26:33.000 I mean, what made it more impressive, you're not just taking on a banana republic, you're taking on maybe a banana republic that's really well funded and really well armed by some of the finest technology allegedly anywhere in the world. 0.75

00:26:43.000 I guess it didn't stand up to ours in this case, but that's a big deal.

00:26:47.000 And I guess the other part of that I'd ask you, I didn't, you know, I always think of the Monroe Doctrine as a little bit more controlling.

00:26:53.000 I didn't realize it was sort of like, hey, you leave us alone.

00:26:55.000 We'll leave you alone.

00:26:56.000 Why is it so controversial that we would continue to exercise this in our own hemisphere, but it wasn't controversial that our greatest adversaries were clearly doing exactly that for the last few decades?

00:27:08.000 Well, because the leftists that whine about the assertion of U.S. might are going to complain no matter what.

00:27:15.000 You also had, in the case of Venezuela, the removal of Maduro, I can't stress the importance of that.

00:27:23.000 And it's very, very similar.

00:27:24.000 There are so many parallels to what the president's now doing in Iran.

00:27:28.000 So when you look at the Middle East with Iran, the Ayatollah and all of his fanatics, they are really at the root of all of the instability, the violence, the terrorism, and the disruption across the Middle East. 0.95

00:27:40.000 Exactly the same case in Latin America.

00:27:42.000 The Venezuelan regime was fomenting Bolivarian socialism and communism all over Latin America using oil revenue to underwrite these regimes, whether you're talking about Lula in Brazil or AMLO in Mexico or Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua or in Cuba, for instance.

00:28:04.000 It was the Venezuelans propping those left-wing movements up.

00:28:10.000 Now that Maduro is gone and Del C is under the thumb, that revenue stream has dried up.

00:28:16.000 And unlike the leftists who complain about an assertive Monroe doctrine in Latin America, the Latin American communities across almost universally welcome this new approach because they know it means an end to the corruption, an end to the autocracy, and a restoration of the rule of law and democracy.

00:28:36.000 So what is happening in those, you know, obviously you knew Venezuela was feeding a lot of these criminals to the United States that were clearly financing a lot of the drug trafficking that was coming here.

00:28:45.000 But I didn't really think that much about them funding some of the other sort of, let's call it, you know, communist socialist regimes of Latin America.

00:28:53.000 You mentioned a few of them.

00:28:55.000 How did that work?

00:28:57.000 Was that a big political play to keep leftists in power?

00:28:59.000 You obviously a lot of the, you see the conflicts in Brazil between the current government and the prior and arresting their political opponents.

00:29:07.000 You've seen the same in some of the other countries you mentioned.

00:29:10.000 I didn't realize that that funding even, you know, I was thinking of going north and causing trouble and getting rid of their bad people and creating problems in America, but it was also going south, maintaining those other unstable and unhealthy regimes.

00:29:22.000 Absolutely.

00:29:23.000 And the number of different sort of contrivances that they would use varied country by country.

00:29:30.000 In the case of Nicaragua, it was a corruption scheme involving Petavesa, the Venezuelan state oil company that was shipping oil to Nicaragua, but then Ortega and his family were skimming the revenues there and then taking that money to, I'm just, you know, an example, taking that money to basically buy up all of the media, the free media in the country to silence it.

00:29:54.000 The Venezuelans themselves did the same thing.

00:29:56.000 This guy, Raul Garin, was used in a currency manipulation scheme, generated millions and then bought and silenced the main television station, Globo Vision, which was very critical of the Chavez and Maduro regimes.

00:30:12.000 And so that kind of play, strangling democracy through the destruction of free media, was a pretty standard MO for the way they would use this money.

00:30:25.000 Yeah, I've heard similar from even in Mexico that happening where they're skimming the Mexican state owned gas facilities, skimming the oil, selling it on their own, and then basically just using it to go buy votes for the parties in power.

00:30:38.000 I'm sure some of that money is getting in their pockets, but it's literally like, we're going to skim off this.

00:30:43.000 I don't remember what it was, but there was a pretty successful Mexican businessman who was like, oh, yeah, it was billions of dollars, just lost oil.

00:30:48.000 It went from storage facility to its destination and a big percentage was magically missing.

00:30:54.000 And then everyone gets paid 30, 35 bucks a vote and they keep the other people in power.

00:31:00.000 Right.

00:31:00.000 And in the case of Cuba, so what the Cubans did for the Venezuelans was they provided the Praetorian Guard that surrounded Maduro because they didn't trust the Venezuelan army to protect him.

00:31:12.000 Of course, that elite Cuban force was what got shredded by Delta when they went in and captured him. 0.97

00:31:19.000 That was the vision.

00:31:20.000 You see him carrying the boxes back out to Cuba.

00:31:22.000 Because you think of it, you know, listen, I don't think of Cuba as sophisticated a regime, and they don't have the natural resources to necessarily back it up.

00:31:29.000 So it was curious to see that I got China, Russia, Iran maybe being involved, but Cuba, how did that happen?

00:31:37.000 Because I think of Venezuela as probably a more sophisticated dictatorship, not because of any real level of sophistication, but because they actually had the potential capital based on their oil reserves or rare earth minerals or whatever it may be to actually fund whatever their activities were.

00:31:54.000 Cuba is an artifact of the Cold War, right?

00:31:57.000 And so they were the beachhead for the Soviets. 0.95

00:32:01.000 And so the Soviets had a massive signals intelligence station on Cuba.

00:32:05.000 Now the Chinese have it. 0.99

00:32:07.000 But the Soviets trained up Cuban intelligence.

00:32:09.000 And Cuban intelligence is actually one of the most dangerous and formidable intelligence services in the world. 0.99

00:32:17.000 Obviously not on par with what we can do as demonstrated.

00:32:21.000 But what they were doing was they were furnishing that Praetorian Guard.

00:32:25.000 They were also providing some cyber counterintelligence capabilities to the regime.

00:32:30.000 And in exchange, they were getting free oil.

00:32:32.000 And so now what you see with just in the past couple of days, the protests in Havana with the brownouts, the blackouts, because Cuba's not getting that free oil anymore.

00:32:42.000 So the old Soviet communist proxy, which helped spawn some of these movements across the region, they're on the ropes.

00:32:52.000 And the president's made clear that that regime's days are numbered.

00:32:56.000 And Marco Rubio is rumored to be in discussions with them about kind of the inevitability of all this.

00:33:01.000 So I do think that the Don Rowe doctrine is in full effect.

00:33:06.000 And I think this administration is only getting started.

00:33:10.000 I did want to point you to one very, very dangerous thing that the regime, the Maduro regime, which by the way, included Del Codriguez, who is still there, her brother Jorge.

00:33:22.000 One of the things that they were doing is there's an indictment of a guy named El Zabayar.

00:33:29.000 And El Zabayar is indicted because he was sent by Maduro and Diasdado Caballo, who's the interior minister, the repression police guy.

00:33:39.000 He was sent to the Middle East to basically trade cocaine for Hezbollah weapons and Hezbollah fighters and Hamas fighters.

00:33:47.000 And he was instructed by Caballo.

00:33:49.000 And this is all in a New York indictment of El Zabayar.

00:33:53.000 But Caballo basically told him, go out there, recruit these people, bring them back, and we're going to set up training camps inside Venezuela to go conduct attacks against U.S. interests.

00:34:02.000 And so what we saw during the Maduro regime was we saw just a landslide of passports issued to Middle Easterners, people who couldn't even speak Spanish.

00:34:13.000 They imported Hezbollah and Hamas and they set them up in training camps all over this place called Margarita Island and multiple different Hezbollah camps on that island.

00:34:25.000 So they were there, they still are there.

00:34:29.000 And the Venezuelan regime was deliberately importing this Middle Eastern terrorist threat to attack us. 0.97

00:34:35.000 So it seems like the new leaders are seemingly working pretty well with America.

00:34:40.000 I think they understand what can happen.

00:34:41.000 I mean, what do we do about mitigating that threat and eliminating it entirely?

00:34:45.000 Because if that's still active, that would be shocking to me if we know about it and nothing's been done.

00:34:52.000 Well, we know about it for sure.

00:34:54.000 And we've known about it for years.

00:34:56.000 Years ago, I was the assistant secretary of defense for war, defense at the time for special operations, and we knew that there was a passport-related operation on Margarita Island.

00:35:06.000 But it's gotten so much worse, and they are still there.

00:35:09.000 The good news is, with an embassy, with restoration of diplomatic relations, we now have a footprint on the ground where we can gather additional information to be much more pinpoint precise.

00:35:20.000 But this is something that the regime is going to have to be forced to deal with.

00:35:26.000 It'll be difficult for as long as Diasdado is around. 1.00

00:35:28.000 Obviously, he's got a $25 million bounty on him for the narcotics trafficking into the U.S. Delcie does not currently have any reward money offered for her, though she is sanctioned by the Treasury for being a massive human rights abuser. 0.99

00:35:44.000 But I think the strategy is working.

00:35:49.000 She is compliant and they are making progress.

00:35:53.000 They've seen really the expulsion of a lot of the Russian and Chinese operators, the Cuban operators.

00:36:01.000 So progress is definitely happening on the ground without massive social unrest and violence.

00:36:08.000 Yeah, I mean, Maduro got taken down in January after the administration went from sanctions to actually striking drug boats and seizing tankers.

00:36:17.000 You've sanctioned members of his regime at Treasury, and then we saw Biden basically do the opposite.

00:36:24.000 Where do we stand now in terms of all of that?

00:36:28.000 So I think one of the cases you're referring to is this guy named Alex Saab.

00:36:33.000 So Alex Saab is at the heart of this plot because he was Maduro's bagman.

00:36:41.000 So Alex Saab is a Colombian, as we're now discovering, so is Maduro, in violation of the Venezuelan Constitution.

00:36:49.000 But Alex Saab was put in charge of a number of money laundering schemes, and he's been indicted in the U.S. for those, for some of those.

00:37:00.000 And we got him.

00:37:01.000 Eventually, we got him.

00:37:02.000 I was after him personally because I found one of the most horrific schemes was this thing called the CLAP program.

00:37:11.000 So Maduro would not let humanitarian assistance, despite the fact he destroyed the country and people were starving, he would not let humanitarian assistance come in to provide food aid to the Venezuelan people.

00:37:21.000 Why?

00:37:22.000 Because he controlled the distribution of food boxes.

00:37:25.000 That's what these clap boxes are, is food boxes.

00:37:28.000 He used it as an instrument of domestic control.

00:37:32.000 So if you were a good little Venezuelan and you voted for the peace of for the Chavista party, you got your clap box. 0.61

00:37:40.000 You didn't vote for us, and they could tell by the fatherland cards they would distribute, no food for you.

00:37:47.000 But what Alex Saab was doing was he basically got a sole source contract for this clap program, and then he proceeded to inflate the prices and to basically package up sub-human, substandard foodstuffs, weevils in the flour, these infant formula that was basically Chinese plastics, all this kind of just stuff not fit for human consumption.

00:38:12.000 And he was making money hand over fist from Maduro doing that.

00:38:16.000 And so using hunger as a weapon, I found that most particularly offensive.

00:38:21.000 But once we started working against Saab, he got more and more important with the regime to the point that he was so influential that Maduro put him in charge of brokering weapons deals with the Iranians.

00:38:35.000 And that's when we finally got him in Cape Verde.

00:38:38.000 He was en route to Iran to do a major weapons deal when they snagged him.

00:38:43.000 We got him.

00:38:44.000 It took quite a while.

00:38:46.000 The Cape Verdeans were under enormous pressure from the Russians, the Iranians, the Venezuelans, the Lebanese to let him go.

00:38:54.000 They stood firm and they let they extradited him to us.

00:38:58.000 And then Biden turns around and lets the guy go.

00:39:01.000 Are you serious?

00:39:02.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:39:04.000 He traded him for.

00:39:05.000 Do you remember the whole thing with Fat Leonard, the admiral, the corrupt admiral who or the corrupt guy who was doing all the Navy contracts?

00:39:12.000 Yeah.

00:39:13.000 Yeah.

00:39:13.000 So Fat Leonard was under house arrest.

00:39:16.000 He's dying from cancer.

00:39:18.000 So he did a runner and went to Venezuela.

00:39:20.000 They grabbed him.

00:39:21.000 And Joe Biden issued a pardon and traded Alex Saab for Fat Leonard.

00:39:27.000 Regardless of the fact that it's a bad trade, and your father never had to trade for any hostage release.

00:39:36.000 Joe Biden was all about, you know, remember he gave up Victor Bill for the merchant of death for Brittany Greiner.

00:39:42.000 I mean, it doesn't seem like a great trade.

00:39:43.000 I mean, I imagine that guy's peddling death again, but yeah, he's right back in it.

00:39:48.000 He was caught or identified as selling, brokering weapons to the Houthis.

00:39:53.000 Well, Alex Saab got released under a Biden pardon and went right back to it again.

00:39:58.000 But recently, Del C has arrested him and they are now in the process of negotiating extradition to the United States.

00:40:07.000 I think he's coming back to the U.S. to face additional charges.

00:40:10.000 And that is going to be of monumental importance because this guy, Alex Saab, he knows where Maduro's money is.

00:40:17.000 Yeah, I mean, so I know there's sort of billions in seized assets from Maduro and perhaps his inner circle.

00:40:24.000 I guess this is one way to get to that.

00:40:26.000 And then what do you ultimately think is the end use of that money once it's seized?

00:40:32.000 Several end uses.

00:40:34.000 We're talking, I mean, it almost defies human comprehension how much money was stolen by the Maduro regime.

00:40:40.000 We're talking probably $300 billion over the past couple decades.

00:40:45.000 And that money is all over the place.

00:40:48.000 Some of it is frozen in the U.S., a lot of it is in Europe.

00:40:53.000 Some of it's in Russia, some of it in Dubai and other places.

00:40:59.000 There are a couple of things.

00:41:00.000 First and foremost, that money should be made available to American families who have been victimized and terrorized by the regime under lawsuits here domestically, under anti-terrorism-related lawsuits.

00:41:16.000 So that money is targetable by those families.

00:41:20.000 It's also targetable by American companies that were expropriated unlawfully, who lost their business operations because the socialists just came in and took everything. 0.52

00:41:32.000 And then finally, that money needs to be returned to help rebuild Mexico or Mexico, Venezuela, I should say.

00:41:39.000 I mean, that money belongs to the Venezuelan people.

00:41:41.000 It was stolen from the Venezuelan people.

00:41:43.000 And the price tag of getting Venezuela back up on its feet is very large.

00:41:52.000 It's not insurmountable because Venezuela has these massive oil reserves.

00:41:56.000 They have massive gold reserves.

00:41:58.000 Their human capital is still among the best in Latin America.

00:42:03.000 So this country can rebound pretty quickly.

00:42:05.000 But finding that money and coming up with a mechanism to bring it back to Venezuela is going to be will take years and it'll have to be a sustained effort.

00:42:16.000 And to your point, I think, you know, unlike a lot of other regimes in that part of the world, they do have the natural resources.

00:42:16.000 Yeah.

00:42:22.000 I mean, it can be done right.

00:42:23.000 I mean, this can go back to being a success story.

00:42:25.000 And Venezuela was the, you know, certainly the richest per capita nation in Latin America, if not the sort of Western hemisphere, for years.

00:42:35.000 You know, hopefully that can be the case again.

00:42:38.000 It will be.

00:42:38.000 You know, I know a lot of the Venezuelan people, the Venezuelan opposition.

00:42:43.000 I know you've talked repeatedly to Maria Carina Machado, the Nobel Prize winner and others.

00:42:50.000 And this is a very, very smart, talented people.

00:42:54.000 So there's no question in my mind that they will rebound.

00:42:57.000 I think that we just have to recognize that the president and Marco Rubio have a strategy and it's working.

00:43:05.000 And that strategy is executing ultimately towards free and fair elections, which haven't been held.

00:43:13.000 But when those elections happen, and they should happen, you know, I couldn't put a timeline on it, but they'll happen.

00:43:19.000 during this Trump administration.

00:43:22.000 And I think you will see the Venezuelan people themselves go down the path of restoring democracy.

00:43:28.000 And this will all be accomplished without boots on the ground by the United States.

00:43:32.000 Obviously, that's a really big deal.

00:43:35.000 At Treasury, you screen foreign investments for national security threats through CIFIA.

00:43:40.000 Again, China's been pouring money into Latin America for years, ports, telecom, mining.

00:43:46.000 If you were still in that chair, what are some of the other things that you'd be flagging?

00:43:52.000 And do we even have the tools to counter it when these deals are technically outside of the United States and its jurisdiction?

00:43:59.000 We do.

00:44:00.000 And there's a number of things that should be done that were terminated under Biden.

00:44:06.000 I'll give you a couple examples.

00:44:08.000 So I spent a lot of time in Panama working on those problems.

00:44:13.000 And one of the things that I told the Panamanians is you're losing control of the canal to the Chinese, and this has got to stop. 1.00

00:44:20.000 And so I actually had Treasury translate a kind of a slimmed down version of our CIFIAS law into Spanish.

00:44:29.000 And then we formatted it in kind of the way the Panamanians do presidential directives.

00:44:33.000 And I gave it to the Panamanians and said, you need to issue this.

00:44:36.000 You need to create a screening process because you're being eaten alive by the Chinese and you don't even know it. 1.00

00:44:42.000 They didn't do anything with it.

00:44:43.000 In fact, the president on the way out awarded a slew of new contracts under highly dubious circumstances to the Chinese.

00:44:50.000 Like a briefcase of cash.

00:44:52.000 Yeah.

00:44:53.000 And so, you know, we need as a nation and the treasury together with the Justice Department needs to be pushing these countries to create their own CIFIA type processes to scrutinize foreign purchases of critical infrastructure.

00:45:10.000 And I think that that would go a long way.

00:45:13.000 Another thing that happened under the Biden administration was they basically clawed back all of the Treasury, not all, but most, many of the Treasury attaches overseas.

00:45:24.000 And I've been talking with the current team.

00:45:26.000 I strongly feel that we need to put more attachés out there because these are experienced financial warriors who sit at the embassy.

00:45:36.000 This isn't something a State Department person knows how to do.

00:45:39.000 It isn't something that a CIA guy or a DEA guy knows how to do.

00:45:43.000 It's a unique skill set.

00:45:44.000 But when you put these treasury people into these high-risk jurisdictions, and then you also send maybe some DOJ folks to help train, prosecuting money laundering is one of the hardest things to do.

00:45:57.000 And that's why a lot of people don't want to do it.

00:45:59.000 But sending retired tax judges who've seen tax evasion, which is basically money laundering, sending them out to help train local friendly prosecutors is another key thing I think that needs to be done hand in glove.

00:46:15.000 And it's consistent, again, with the president's agenda of not needing to use force, but using all manner of other national instruments of power.

00:46:26.000 Marshall, that's incredible stuff.

00:46:29.000 I realize that a lot of people may not understand what CFIAS even is.

00:46:32.000 Can you give us the quick 30 seconds on CFIA, what it means, what it's intended to do, just because we're talking acronyms that they may not fully understand if they're not kind of watching this stuff every day.

00:46:42.000 Right.

00:46:43.000 So that stands for the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S.

00:46:43.000 Apologies.

00:46:43.000 Yeah.

00:46:47.000 And that is a law, I forget when it was actually enacted, but over the past couple of years and then significantly expanded in the first Trump administration.

00:46:56.000 What it does is it basically requires foreign investors who want to buy something that we in the U.S. government feel is of vital importance to us, critical in some way.

00:47:10.000 They have to provide paperwork that shows who they are, where did they get their money, and what are they planning to do with this purchase, with this acquisition?

00:47:22.000 This law came into being because we discovered we were just being gobbled up by the communist Chinese. 1.00

00:47:27.000 I remember in the Bush administration that they were buying huge plots of land next to naval air stations.

00:47:38.000 Right.

00:47:38.000 Because they were going to put up quote unquote windmills, which are basically self-powered collection platforms next to our naval bases.

00:47:49.000 And we just didn't even know it.

00:47:50.000 They had shell companies to buy the property and all this stuff.

00:47:53.000 They were buying into our defense companies.

00:47:55.000 So if they couldn't hack it from the outside and steal the intellectual property, they just buy it outright or they do a combination of both.

00:48:03.000 So that's why this law came into being.

00:48:05.000 And that's why the Treasury administers that process.

00:48:10.000 And so, you know, I didn't run the process at Treasury, but I had the Treasury quote unquote vote.

00:48:15.000 And I looked for basically three things.

00:48:18.000 One is, is DOD good with this?

00:48:23.000 Has DOD signed off?

00:48:25.000 Department of War.

00:48:27.000 Two, where did you get your money?

00:48:30.000 Where is all this money coming from?

00:48:32.000 And three, are you, have you or your company, whoever you are, whether you're Chinese or you're French, have you been doing business with bad guys that we've sanctioned?

00:48:45.000 And so, you know, they needed to successfully pass those questions in order for, and others from other departments and agencies in order to get a green light to make the buy.

00:48:54.000 Interesting.

00:48:56.000 What role today does perhaps the AI or other technology play into combating illicit criminal syndicates?

00:49:03.000 And are American banks cooperating with these efforts?

00:49:07.000 They are, but I would say we're behind the curve.

00:49:13.000 We really need to be an early adopter of using AI in terms of penetrating these opaque shell company webs.

00:49:23.000 It's very doable, but right now the process is really manual and therefore very slow.

00:49:30.000 But, you know, as we've seen in the case of, you know, these Somali daycare, you know, clinics in Minnesota, or now, you know, now we're seeing the latest in Los Angeles with cancer treatment.

00:49:47.000 You know, these structures are not terribly cleverly set up.

00:49:52.000 They just roll in, they get an office building, and then they mint out 15 companies located at one little premise.

00:50:01.000 These are detectable things that AI will greatly help with.

00:50:05.000 And I think we need to jump on it.

00:50:07.000 Yeah, I mean, it feels like for a lot of that, it shouldn't even take AI to actually discover it.

00:50:13.000 I mean, the Minnesota stuff is absolutely insane.

00:50:15.000 The stuff that I've seen about hospice care in California, you know, I mean, 85 different hospice centers in one building with one address.

00:50:21.000 I'm like, it's sort of hard to believe that our systems, even before AI, don't flag these sorts of things.

00:50:28.000 And it sort of feels like that's because the beneficiaries are incentivized to not have that happen.

00:50:34.000 In this case, I think a lot of this is kicked back to the Democrat Party.

00:50:37.000 These are big voters of theirs.

00:50:38.000 They're donating to their campaigns.

00:50:40.000 There's a reason they're outraising us five to one, even in Republican seats.

00:50:45.000 How much complicity do you think there is on behalf of the government officials?

00:50:49.000 And I imagine it's happening everywhere, but I would think that these blue states are probably far worse because it seems to be their MO.

00:50:56.000 It's absolutely their MO.

00:50:58.000 And I think they are complicit because they benefit politically from the patronage system that gets set up around this massive amount of corruption.

00:51:07.000 What's worse, though, for instance, the case of the Somalis, is that a lot of that stuff was going in duffel bags on planes through the UAE back ultimately to Somalia, where Al-Shabaab, an al-Qaeda terrorist organization that has killed Americans, takes a cut.

00:51:23.000 So this was financing terrorism at its root level, not just funding Democrat campaigns and Ilon Omar's pocketbook.

00:51:34.000 So we need to clamp down.

00:51:35.000 But these departments and agencies, the IRS, FinCEN, they're operating with antiquated IT systems that just haven't been modernized to handle big data and to make best use of it.

00:51:50.000 I think that's something that Doge was getting at.

00:51:53.000 And I think we have to keep on it.

00:51:56.000 I remember we did a particular thing involving bank accounts across multiple New York banks that we believed might be related to North Korea.

00:52:08.000 And the banks dumped huge, wasn't a huge quantity of data by Department of War standards, but for FinCEN, it was a massive amount of data, and they just couldn't pound their way through it.

00:52:20.000 So I ultimately had to negotiate an MOU with the Air Force to get them to mine the data to show us the network that was sitting behind all these various different bank accounts.

00:52:31.000 And we discovered all kinds of stuff going on that we had no idea.

00:52:34.000 Wow.

00:52:35.000 I mean, if you could give one piece of advice to the current administration, what would it be?

00:52:42.000 Keep doing what you're doing.

00:52:43.000 It's working.

00:52:45.000 I mean, it really, I'm just over the moon on where things are headed with Venezuela.

00:52:53.000 You know, we tried our level best in the first administration to get rid of Maduro.

00:52:58.000 Now he's gone.

00:53:03.000 The campaign plan against the mullahs in Iran is working. 0.99

00:53:08.000 And again, we're going to see this regime so thoroughly weakened again without having to put boots on the ground that there will be a massive decline in terrorism across the Middle East.

00:53:22.000 I mean, the Iranians have killed, I mean, they've killed more, thousands of Americans over the years, starting 47 years ago when they took our embassy employees hostage.

00:53:33.000 And so I shed no tears over the elimination of the supreme leader.

00:53:39.000 I'm rooting for his kid to go the same route.

00:53:43.000 And I think we just, we have to keep the pressure on.

00:53:46.000 We're making good progress.

00:53:48.000 Well, Marshall, I really appreciate it.

00:53:49.000 Thank you so much.

00:53:51.000 Really insightful.

00:53:53.000 Scary how sophisticated these networks have become.

00:53:56.000 This isn't, you know, your everyday criminals, even in places that you think of sort of, you know, banana republic.

00:54:02.000 You know, they have figured out how to work the systems in a probably more sophisticated way than many people who do that in a legitimate way for a living.

00:54:11.000 Yeah, but I'll tell you, Scott Besant and his team, they're on it.

00:54:14.000 And Scott's been a rock star.

00:54:16.000 They are.

00:54:17.000 And his assistant secretary, the guy who has my old job, is phenomenal too, Jonathan Burke.

00:54:22.000 Great guy.

00:54:23.000 Awesome.

00:54:23.000 Well, Marshall, thanks again.

00:54:25.000 Really appreciate you being here.

00:54:26.000 And guys, I hope you enjoyed that one.

00:54:30.000 Thank you.

00:54:30.000 Great to be with you.

00:54:32.000 Guys, thanks so much for tuning in.

00:54:34.000 Hit that notification button so you never miss an episode.

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00:54:46.000 Again, like, share, subscribe.

00:54:48.000 Get it out there.

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00:54:51.000 We need to break through the walls.

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00:54:55.000 You guys are part of it.

00:54:56.000 So hit the like button, share it with a bunch of your friends, and also check out our amazing sponsors down below and in the video description.

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00:55:21.000 I'll talk to you all again

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Triggered - Donald Trump Jr - March 16, 2026

How the Cartels Launder Billions and Inflict Terror, Interview with Marshall Billingslea | Triggered Ep.325

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