Triggered - Donald Trump Jr - June 04, 2026


The Donroe Doctrine & the Cuba Squeeze, Plus Interview with Marshall Billingslea | Triggered Ep.347


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Length

48 minutes

Words per minute

147.28946

Word count

7,200

Sentence count

454

Harmful content

Misogyny

5

sentences flagged

Toxicity

6

sentences flagged

Hate speech

23

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Former U.S. Treasury official Marshall Billingsley joins me on the show to talk about the Cuban embargo, the drug trade, the Venezuelan drug cartels, and much more. He also talks about the latest in the Trump administration s campaign against the Castro regime.

Transcript

Transcripts from "Triggered - Donald Trump Jr" are sourced from the Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool. Explore them interactively here.
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:06:06.000 Thank you.
00:06:22.000 Hey guys, welcome to another huge episode of Triggered.
00:06:25.000 I hope everyone is having a great week and it's great to be with you guys as always.
00:06:31.000 We have an important show today a deep dive into the transactional crime cartels.
00:06:37.000 You know, basically Cuba, you know, at least some of the bad actors in Venezuela, Mexico, so much more.
00:06:44.000 Because for years, Washington treated, especially Cuba, like a museum exhibit.
00:06:49.000 You know, everyone knew the regime was brutal, everyone knew the economy was a disaster, everyone knew the Cuban people were being.
00:06:55.000 Crushed and were suffering greatly, but there wasn't the sense of urgency to actually do anything about it, right?
00:07:02.000 There's all talk, no action, the usual. 0.55
00:07:05.000 Now the Trump administration is putting real pressure on the communist regime in Havana economic pressure, legal pressure, diplomatic pressure, military pressure, and a very clear message that the era of Cuban acting like an untouchable communist outpost in the Western Hemisphere may finally be coming to an end.
00:07:26.000 On May 20th, the Department of Justice unsealed a superseding indictment charging Raul Castro and five other Castro regime's defendants for their roles in the 1996 shootdown of two civilian aircraft over international waters.
00:07:41.000 Three American citizens were killed.
00:07:43.000 Families waited for 30 years for accountability.
00:07:48.000 That's a big deal because dictatorships survive by programming people to believe that time erases everything all of the crimes, all of the brutality, all of it.
00:07:58.000 That the victims will be forgotten.
00:08:00.000 But we deserve a foreign policy that notices when a hostile regime 90 miles away from Florida, who works with our enemies to export less terrorism all over the place.
00:08:10.000 So we're actually dealing with it, which is kind of nice.
00:08:14.000 Today, we'll have Marshall Billingsley back on the show.
00:08:17.000 He previously served as an assistant secretary for terrorist financing at the Treasury Department.
00:08:22.000 He led international efforts to counter illicit financial activity.
00:08:26.000 He served as president of the Financial Action Task Force, and he worked extensively on the intersection of money, sanctions, National security and hostile regimes.
00:08:38.000 So, guys, make sure to check out this show.
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00:11:09.000 Joining me now, former Trump Treasury official, Marshall Billingsley.
00:11:15.000 Marshall, great to have you back on the show.
00:11:16.000 How are you?
00:11:17.000 I'm great, and it's great to be with you today.
00:11:19.000 So I really appreciate it.
00:11:21.000 You know, maybe let's start at the high level, let's start at, you know, 36,000 feet.
00:11:25.000 People hear Cuba and they think, you know, this is sort of an old story, the Cold War, Castro, sanctions, and nothing ever changes.
00:11:34.000 Why is this moment actually different?
00:11:38.000 It's different because of President Trump.
00:11:41.000 It's different because during the Cold War, the Cuban regime was heavily bankrolled by the Soviets and then the Russians.
00:11:50.000 And when they kind of backed out, the Venezuelan regime under Chavez and then Maduro stepped in.
00:11:55.000 But since President Trump has Removed Maduro from Venezuela and put Delcy Rodriguez on a very short leash.
00:12:05.000 That revenue, mostly subsidized oil, about a third of what the Cubans needed for all their energy, was given at cut rate prices by the Venezuelan regime.
00:12:13.000 That's all dried up.
00:12:15.000 And so the regime is very, very vulnerable right now.
00:12:18.000 And what you're seeing the administration do is going back to the playbook we executed in the first administration, reimposing a lot of those measures that Obama had taken off and then Biden again took off.
00:12:30.000 And the pressure on the regime is significant and is going to grow even further.
00:12:35.000 So, I mean, you mentioned the regime is vulnerable, but is it as vulnerable as it's ever been, perhaps?
00:12:39.000 Or, you know, do you go through the sort of cycles of vulnerability and we're at somewhere we've seen?
00:12:45.000 Can you take us maybe through some of that history and how that actually looks?
00:12:49.000 Yeah, they're very vulnerable.
00:12:51.000 I would say they're at their most vulnerable because there is no benefactor to step in and bail them out.
00:12:58.000 The people of the country are absolutely, they've had it with this regime.
00:13:04.000 They live in absolute abject poverty.
00:13:07.000 And then you have, you know, the grandson of Fidel Castro strutting around as a 33 year old media influencer with his yachts, and the grandson of Raul Castro strutting around with his Rolexes and his yachts.
00:13:21.000 And they see it, they see it for what it is.
00:13:23.000 So there's a lot of unhappiness.
00:13:25.000 And I don't think it's going to be a huge lift for the Trump administration to push this regime over.
00:13:32.000 So you mentioned Delcy Rodriguez from Venezuela.
00:13:34.000 Obviously, that was, you know, that was part of the.
00:13:36.000 Maduro regime, but it actually seems like, if I'm just being an objective outside looking in, it seems like they're playing pretty good ball with the United States right now.
00:13:47.000 They are.
00:13:48.000 And I think it's a great credit to the Secretary of State and to the President for how they're playing a very careful, very calibrated game here by ensuring that there is domestic stability maintained while pressuring the regime to abandon its ties to.
00:14:08.000 The likes of Russia, the likes of China, the terrorist groups.
00:14:12.000 By getting control, we now sit basically in control of how the oil revenues are dispersed back to Venezuela.
00:14:19.000 That all comes through a treasury account here in the United States.
00:14:22.000 So we have a lot to say about making sure that that money isn't stolen by Delcy the way she used to be doing it.
00:14:29.000 And, you know, time will tell as we see whether we're able to get on a track for elections here. 0.91
00:14:36.000 Certainly, I think her plan is to try to slow roll this as best she can.
00:14:39.000 But I think Secretary Rubio and the president know that full well.
00:14:43.000 Interesting.
00:14:43.000 I mean, you know, the Trump administration is putting a lot of pressure on the Cuban regime from, you know, multiple directions.
00:14:48.000 Obviously, you have the oil situation, which we've sort of tangentially just discussed.
00:14:52.000 You have sanctions, legal accountability, diplomacy.
00:14:56.000 You know, what do you think the strategy is sort of in plain English and, you know, the end goals?
00:15:03.000 So they're doing in this administration basically what we did to Venezuela in the first administration, which is you're going to see the Department of State and the Treasury in support.
00:15:14.000 Issuing on a periodic but rolling basis, further tightening, incremental pressure, incremental tightening of sanctions.
00:15:23.000 The new executive orders that were issued just 26 days after Maduro was snatched so successfully from Caracas, the executive order on Cuba laid out some pretty, pretty strenuous sanctions across multiple sectors.
00:15:36.000 So they targeted energy, they targeted finance, defense and security, mining, and so on.
00:15:44.000 But they did some other very interesting things.
00:15:47.000 For the first time, we have the loaded gun of secondary sanctions against any financial institutions that do business with this crowd on the table. 0.89
00:15:55.000 And so that's a big warning shot for the banks in Mexico that like to play ball with the Cubans. 0.90
00:16:01.000 There are a lot of banks in Spain and a lot of banks in France and Germany that have been playing footsie with the regime, and now they're under threat of sanctions. 0.74
00:16:10.000 The other thing they did, which I strongly support, is they put on the table the possibility of sanctioning the adult relatives of corrupt regime officials.
00:16:20.000 So, you know, these kids who are now in their adult years who are living high in the hog because of all the money their father and grandfather stole are at risk themselves of being targeted.
00:16:33.000 So, you know, what is that goal line?
00:16:35.000 I mean, is it a negotiated transition?
00:16:38.000 Is it regime collapse, new elections?
00:16:40.000 Or, you know, is it some sort of machination of all of these things, something else?
00:16:44.000 It's, I think probably it'll be, you never know.
00:16:47.000 With these dictatorial regimes, sometimes they collapse.
00:16:50.000 I mean, just look at Syria, right?
00:16:51.000 I mean, it collapsed overnight.
00:16:54.000 But I think probably a negotiated transition is more in the cards.
00:17:01.000 The interesting thing that will make the Cuban evolution different from Venezuela is that you have a longstanding law on the books called the Helms Burton Act.
00:17:10.000 It was enacted in 1996 by Jesse Helms, who actually I was working for at the time in the Foreign Relations Committee, and Dan Burton.
00:17:18.000 And it lays out, it has, I'd say, two main areas of law that are now going to become very, very relevant.
00:17:26.000 So the first is this thing called Title III.
00:17:29.000 Which the president, President Trump, was the first president to allow to go into force.
00:17:34.000 Every president before him had waived the application of Title III.
00:17:38.000 But what Title III allows is for U.S. citizens or Cubans who have since moved back into the United States, who had their property expropriated, they can file suit in U.S. courts to get that property back.
00:17:54.000 So this will be a case where the matter of who goes in and takes over.
00:18:01.000 The cobalt nickel mine, which once was owned by Freeport, that'll be a pretty standard settled matter via the U.S. courts, which you don't really have that for Venezuela.
00:18:11.000 The other important thing is Title II of Helms Burden, which very clearly in law says what a transitional government is and by extension, what one is not.
00:18:21.000 And it lays out five or six criteria, which are the same kinds of criteria that we're pushing Delcy Rodriguez towards, but these are actually set in law.
00:18:30.000 And so it will have to be, you know, A regime transition that has legalized all political activity, that has released all the political prisoners.
00:18:39.000 You know, Delcy still hasn't done that in Venezuela, that has dissolved the repression apparatus.
00:18:45.000 Diaz Dado is still in Venezuela right now.
00:18:48.000 Hopefully, we'll get our hands on him eventually.
00:18:50.000 Organizing and committed to a timetable for organizing free and fair elections.
00:18:54.000 So, those are kind of statutory things that will guide what the U.S. basically the president will need to certify to Congress that whomever we're playing ball with meets these criteria.
00:19:06.000 In order for some of the sanctions to come off and some of the funding flows to go.
00:19:11.000 So, how does it work for regular families?
00:19:12.000 I mean, growing up even in New York and also Florida, I know so many of these Cuban families, they were super successful people there.
00:19:22.000 You mentioned cobalt and nickel mines, that may be a thing, but they had to get on a boat overnight and get the hell out of Dodge or they were probably going to be killed.
00:19:33.000 What happens to those families who had great real estate and homes and Frankly, the opportunity cost of what they could have done had it remained sort of a thriving metropolis as it was when all this disaster started.
00:19:50.000 I mean, it was a very wealthy country.
00:19:52.000 You had a lot of really intelligent people.
00:19:53.000 You had a lot of success.
00:19:54.000 You had a lot of entrepreneurs.
00:19:57.000 Most of the good ones had to flee.
00:19:59.000 And if they didn't, they probably fared pretty poorly.
00:20:03.000 How do you solve all of that when you had probably 50,000, 100,000 people that were all creators?
00:20:11.000 That fled almost 50 years ago.
00:20:14.000 How do you get them whole or reasonably whole?
00:20:17.000 I mean, there's the clear business is hey, you can take back over a mine, but what do you do about all that stuff that was just lost in art?
00:20:23.000 And I mean, this was a true disaster for so many of those people and those families.
00:20:29.000 I mean, a lot of this is not repairable.
00:20:33.000 I mean, the damage has been done.
00:20:35.000 The Helms Burton law, that Title III law I mentioned, does allow you to go after whoever took the property and was profiting off the property and to get.
00:20:43.000 Compensated not just for the original value, but there's an inflationary thing there.
00:20:49.000 But of course, if the regime, it's the regime basically, this super conglomerate called Gaesa that did much of the appropriation.
00:20:58.000 And if the regime just keels over, then clawing that money back from a defunct organization will be hard.
00:21:04.000 You're going to have to go after the foreign bank accounts of the regime members.
00:21:10.000 And let me tell you, they've got plenty of them.
00:21:13.000 So, how much of the Cuban economy does their military?
00:21:16.000 You know, let's call it the military controlled conglomerate, really touch.
00:21:21.000 I mean, I know that's a big part of it in a lot of these regimes.
00:21:23.000 They're sort of, you know, there's a president, but, you know, it's like the IRGC. 0.53
00:21:27.000 They sort of control, you know, a country from within.
00:21:30.000 You know, what people may not know is that there's this, you know, Cuban business mega conglomerate owned and operated by the Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces.
00:21:39.000 You know, how do you go after that?
00:21:43.000 You know, Don, your analogy to the IRGC is spot on.
00:21:46.000 I mean, it's a very similar business model with the vicious, you know, Regime inner circle, military inner circle that dominates the economy.
00:21:56.000 This conglomerate, Gaiza, easily 50%, many estimates put it closer to 70% of the Cuban economy is controlled by this outfit.
00:22:05.000 And they have got their fingers in everything.
00:22:07.000 They control the ports, they control the tourism business, they control supermarkets, hundreds of gas stations, they control the currency exchanges, they control all the trade in and out.
00:22:20.000 Basically, any currency conversion is going through their greedy little paws.
00:22:25.000 They control that mining business that I mentioned, which actually was a pretty important business.
00:22:29.000 Business to them that just got sanctioned.
00:22:32.000 So, I mean, if an American or European tourist stays at a hotel in Cuba, rents a car, sends a remittance, or spends money at a store, I guess, if they're going there, I know Europe, especially Spain, still has quite a bit of a tourist operation down in Cuba.
00:22:47.000 How much of that money can end up benefiting that regime?
00:22:49.000 How much do they sort of siphon off at the top?
00:22:52.000 Is that something you'd know?
00:22:55.000 Well, I mean, so it varies by sort of what Medea Benjamin and Hassan Piker are about to learn the hard way is that if you go down there as a U.S. citizen, And you pay money to a regime controlled hotel to stay there, and you are delivering goods and services in violation of U.S. sanctions, well, that's a felony.
00:23:13.000 So we'll see how that investigation goes.
00:23:16.000 But the regime absolutely benefits from those kinds of transactions.
00:23:19.000 I mean, when they control the hotel, that money goes right into their pockets.
00:23:24.000 When you fill up your rental car at one of their gas stations, ditto.
00:23:29.000 So because they have their tentacles spread throughout the economy, it's very, very difficult.
00:23:35.000 Particularly for U.S. citizens, very dangerous for U.S. citizens to go down there and think that they're not potentially running afoul of U.S. sanctions.
00:23:42.000 So, you know, you mentioned Hassan Piker.
00:23:43.000 I guess I've read about that a little bit.
00:23:45.000 I mean, you know, what's the allegation there and, you know, what do you think actually happens?
00:23:49.000 Because it feels like, you know, there were sort of rules, but under the prior administration, you know, no one sort of enforced those rules, especially against someone who'd be, you know, left leaning, you know, rules for, you know, me but not for thee kind of thing.
00:24:03.000 You know, how does that exactly play out?
00:24:05.000 And, you know, is this something, it seems like based on what I saw online at least, You know, he just keeps putting out the receipts that doesn't seem to be awesome for his case.
00:24:13.000 He really should lawyer up and stop yapping because he's not helping himself.
00:24:18.000 My understanding is that Treasury has subpoenaed both of them and wants to look into, for one of the examples I gave, where do they stay, which hotel, and what kind of money did they pay?
00:24:30.000 What were the goods that they were delivering on this so called humanitarian mission?
00:24:34.000 What kind of regime propaganda were they collaborating with the regime on messaging?
00:24:39.000 Were they meeting with the regime to optimize?
00:24:41.000 Their social influence campaigns. 1.00
00:24:44.000 We know Medea Benjamin did that all the time with the Maduro regime. 0.69
00:24:47.000 Code Pink, you know, when we kicked under first President Trump's administration, when we kicked Maduro's goons out of the Venezuelan embassy here, the regime turned around and gave the key cards to the embassy to Code Pink so they could occupy it and keep Juan Guaido's people out.
00:25:03.000 As just an example of how Code Pink was collaborating, they ran a petition campaign to try to get the Biden administration in 2022 to drop charges against Alex Saab, Maduro's bagman.
00:25:17.000 So, and we know that Code Pink, it takes money from Neville Singham, who is a billionaire in Shanghai, who has in the past cohabitated offices with the Chinese Communist Party's media operations and so on.
00:25:31.000 So, there looked to be some communist Chinese money flowing into Code Pink as well.
00:25:36.000 So, I think, you know, if they pop the books open on her financing and her financial behaviors, she could be in a lot of trouble.
00:25:43.000 So, Marshall, you perhaps talk a little bit about Treasury because, you know, we think of Treasury as like sort of running the IRS and doing with, you know, U.S. currency and these sorts of things.
00:25:51.000 Can you talk about its involvement as a former Treasury official and how they can investigate these financial crimes?
00:25:58.000 I mean, it seems to go much deeper than I think most people would understand the basic notion of Treasury.
00:26:06.000 Yeah.
00:26:06.000 So after 9 11, we had the commission that was established to look into how did we miss all the indicators and warnings for 9 11?
00:26:15.000 And one of the conclusions was that we did a terrible job of following the money.
00:26:22.000 There were obvious money trails that Al Qaeda had used, bank deposits, credit cards, all kinds of financial transactions that were knowable if we had been looking.
00:26:33.000 And so, in response, Congress created a brand new part of the Treasury called Terrorism Financing and Intelligence, TFI.
00:26:42.000 That's an undersecretary level job.
00:26:44.000 And underneath that are four prongs.
00:26:48.000 There is the Assistant Secretary for Intelligence, which does exactly what you would think.
00:26:52.000 There was the assistant secretary for terrorist financing and financial crimes, which is the job I had.
00:26:58.000 That is the combination job that sets both the policy but also does all the foreign engagement.
00:27:06.000 So, if you need to go deal with a central bank somewhere, if you need to go deal with a private bank or with a foreign intelligence service, that's what that job does.
00:27:15.000 And then you have the well known OFAC, right?
00:27:17.000 That's the sanctions engine and the enforcement arm.
00:27:21.000 And then you have FinCEN, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network.
00:27:25.000 Which is our domestic financial intelligence unit.
00:27:27.000 And that's the organization that receives all the suspicious activity reports that they put in a big data warehouse for law enforcement to look at.
00:27:36.000 That's the outfit.
00:27:37.000 And so that's kind of, if you think about it, that's your war fighting part of the Treasury.
00:27:42.000 So when Scott Besant, the Secretary of the Treasury, gets up and talks about his financial operation against the Iranians, it's those components under TFI that are waging that campaign for him.
00:27:53.000 So, I mean, if this happened at 9 11, it feels like a lot of those resources were available before this.
00:27:58.000 You know, Scott, you know, in this administration seemed to really be actually finally utilizing the full weight and power of the Treasury to actually get these things done.
00:28:06.000 That seems to be effectuating some actual real change.
00:28:09.000 It absolutely is.
00:28:10.000 You know, I would say he's following in a very similar trajectory as Steve Mnuchin did in the sense that with Stephen, we also went hyperactive and hyperaggressive.
00:28:22.000 And we were able to bring both the Iranian regime and the Venezuelan regime to their knees financially.
00:28:29.000 Without any kind of need for American intervention, no boots on the ground, none of that kind of stuff.
00:28:33.000 And I think they're going back to that playbook, which is driving U.S. national security objectives through the financial and economic tools.
00:28:42.000 Yes, some military action here and there, but really using the non kinetic financial tools to advance the president's agenda.
00:28:50.000 And I would say this is particularly the case in the Western hemisphere under the new Trump corollary to the Monroe Doctrine.
00:28:58.000 Yeah, it's interesting because, I mean, actually utilizing that in our backyard seems to be.
00:29:02.000 You know, probably far more important to our interests. 0.91
00:29:05.000 The clear and present danger of a dictatorial regime and a, you know, a narco terrorist state, you know, literally, you know, essentially on our borders is more problematic than probably where we'd focused a lot of the Treasury resources. 0.90
00:29:18.000 But, you know, it's sort of nice to have that in our backyard finally working. 0.96
00:29:21.000 It's refreshing.
00:29:22.000 There are very, very few presidents in my adult life.
00:29:26.000 The very, President Trump is really the only president that has ever paid a great deal of attention to Latin America.
00:29:33.000 And I think he deserves enormous credit.
00:29:35.000 He is following along.
00:29:36.000 You know, there's two different strands of the Monroe Doctrine.
00:29:39.000 There's a much more isolationist version, which is actually what James Monroe had in mind when he promulgated the doctrine.
00:29:45.000 And then you have the Theodore Roosevelt version of the doctrine.
00:29:49.000 And so, what President Trump is doing is much more in the heritage of Theodore Roosevelt and those who believed that the United States should be assertive in this hemisphere and that the foreign powers need to stay out.
00:30:03.000 And in Monroe's time, the foreign powers were the Spanish and the French.
00:30:07.000 In President Trump's time, those foreign powers are the Russians, the Chinese, both of whom are active in Cuba, by the way, the Iranians and their terror proxies.
00:30:18.000 Yeah, it's always interesting when I hear people talk about that.
00:30:20.000 You know, what do we have to do with this?
00:30:22.000 Oh, you only care about the oil.
00:30:23.000 I'm like, yeah, that's exactly what China cares about.
00:30:26.000 You know, certainly as it relates to Venezuela, Cuba, I imagine, has more to do with proximity to the United States, you know, as a launch pad, both literally and figuratively.
00:30:38.000 Yeah, why would China care if it wasn't for that?
00:30:40.000 Why would Iran care if it wasn't for that?
00:30:42.000 And so to actually have America care about that seems to matter, in the words of a wise president, bigly.
00:30:49.000 Absolutely.
00:30:50.000 I mean, look, this is geography, geography, geography, right?
00:30:53.000 We're talking about an island that is 200 miles, give or take, away from U.S. Central Command, U.S. Special Operations Command, all of Florida.
00:31:01.000 And that's why you have 18, roughly 18 different eavesdropping posts on that island, 18 on an island the size of Cuba.
00:31:10.000 So the Russians long operated this massive facility at a place called Lourdes, just outside Havana, where they could pretty much listen to any phone call on the Eastern seaboard during the Cold War.
00:31:21.000 They gave that up for a little while in the early 2000s, but they came back in 2014 and they're running that.
00:31:28.000 Eavesdropping site yet again, and another one.
00:31:30.000 And the Chinese are believed to be sitting in three, maybe four different SIGINT collection sites.
00:31:40.000 So, yeah, it's a real issue.
00:31:41.000 And there's been recent reporting that maybe the Cubans got their hands on some Iranian drones.
00:31:47.000 That's a pretty concerning kind of thing there.
00:31:50.000 It's sort of Cuban missile crisis concerning.
00:31:53.000 Yeah.
00:31:53.000 So, how does that work?
00:31:54.000 I mean, if the Russians gave it up and they came back, what does that proximity really mean as it relates to being able to spy on us and stuff like that?
00:32:02.000 For those, again, I I don't even fully get that.
00:32:04.000 I figured in the digital age, it almost wouldn't matter where you are to be able to do that kind of level of espionage.
00:32:12.000 What does that proximity mean and how does that work?
00:32:15.000 It lets, without getting into too much, without giving up your classified information.
00:32:21.000 Yeah, basically, your cell phone, the emissions off your cell phone are things that they're going to be able to pick up.
00:32:28.000 So that's why I strongly recommend the use of encrypted communications for calls.
00:32:35.000 I personally use Signal among others, but people have their preferences.
00:32:42.000 It doesn't stop them, but it makes it harder.
00:32:45.000 It also puts them in a position to monitor all of the maritime broadcast communications in the Caribbean.
00:32:53.000 So, the way ships communicate, all those Inmarsat phone calls, all that kind of stuff, it puts them in a position to potentially pick off signals coming off of satellites that are within their footprint.
00:33:05.000 So, a lot of different nasty things they can do. 0.95
00:33:09.000 And Cuba is by far and away the most important eavesdropping site for both the communist Chinese in the Western Hemisphere and I would say the Russians in the entire world. 0.99
00:33:20.000 So, Marshall, we touched on this a little bit last time you were on, but perhaps we even touched on it peripherally earlier in this conversation. 0.71
00:33:28.000 But how does a dictatorship like this actually hide the money, move the money, protect the insiders while ordinary people deal with shortages and blackouts?
00:33:38.000 How does that exactly work?
00:33:40.000 And why haven't other places, you mentioned Spanish banking and others, how have they just sort of turned a blind eye to this?
00:33:47.000 Is it just, hey, we'll clip a fee and we keep going?
00:33:52.000 How does that work in detail?
00:33:55.000 Yeah.
00:33:55.000 Well, in some cases, it's willful blindness because they're turning on nice profit and why ask questions, right?
00:34:00.000 In other cases, like we're seeing the case unfold with the former Spanish president, Zapatero, where the raids on his office generated and his home generated bags of cash, all kinds of jewelry, sort of Bob Menendez level stuff.
00:34:15.000 In Zapatero's case, it looks like it was very much tied to corruption with the Maduro regime.
00:34:22.000 So, you get senior officials playing dirty alongside.
00:34:27.000 That Gaesa conglomerate we talked about, they own their own bank called BFI.
00:34:34.000 And through that bank, they move money through these other foreign banks.
00:34:38.000 I mentioned Mexico, Spain, France, Germany, so on.
00:34:41.000 Not a lot else in Latin America, interestingly.
00:34:44.000 Mexico, pretty much, Panama, shell companies in Panama for sure.
00:34:48.000 But they move their money into these foreign banks.
00:34:50.000 And then in those foreign banks, Particularly in jurisdictions where there's no beneficial ownership record, they set up shell corporations and they use those shell corporations to then buy property.
00:35:01.000 So they buy mansions, real estate.
00:35:03.000 There's all kinds of Castro regime properties in Spain.
00:35:11.000 They buy luxury goods.
00:35:14.000 These dictatorial regimes really, I mean, they kind of get it, right?
00:35:17.000 They need a place to go and vacation, especially if everything comes crashing down, and they need a place to get there.
00:35:24.000 a way to get there.
00:35:24.000 So they all like their luxury jets.
00:35:27.000 They all like their premium yachts.
00:35:30.000 And so those are the kinds of things we see them stashing their money in.
00:35:35.000 And then they just have their long-term investments in commercial activities overseas, sometimes completely unknowing by the people that have been invested in because they've used a myriad of shell companies to get there.
00:35:48.000 But that's how they stash their money.
00:35:50.000 Unraveling that is something that That warfighting part of the Treasury knows how to do.
00:35:57.000 And it's a mix of good intelligence work.
00:36:02.000 It's a mix of close collaboration with foreign governments and foreign financial institutions and a lot of just, you know, elbow grease, a lot of just sweat and toil to dig, to pound through the financial records to get to, you know, the bad guys' money.
00:36:19.000 But it is doable and it is being done every day of the week.
00:36:22.000 So, you know, one talking point from the leftists, you know, is that.
00:36:25.000 The U.S. sanctions are actually the real problem, and we should just essentially let these regimes do whatever they want.
00:36:31.000 I mean, is the left's political machine here in the U.S. aligned or even funded by perhaps some of those communist dictatorships?
00:36:40.000 I think 100%.
00:36:42.000 I mentioned sort of the Code Pink relationship with Neville Singham.
00:36:46.000 Now, I'm not sure that that may just be his personal money, but I think the messaging is clearly aligned with Chinese Communist Party interests.
00:36:54.000 Vladimir Putin has been pushing this narrative that sanctions don't work.
00:36:59.000 And we know that the GRU is heavily into social media manipulation, bribing journalists.
00:37:06.000 They've been caught doing that in a number of NATO countries, for instance.
00:37:10.000 I wouldn't put it past them to be trying to do the same thing here.
00:37:13.000 A lot of questions, for instance, about what Candace Owens has been doing.
00:37:18.000 Why is she going to Moscow?
00:37:20.000 I don't know.
00:37:22.000 But we have to beware that this sanctions don't work narrative is a narrative not just on the left, but it's a narrative pushed by our enemies.
00:37:32.000 So, you know, you'd mentioned that Cuba was, you know, a satellite branch for the Soviets, obviously now the Chinese as well, that's become a growing threat.
00:37:40.000 You know, are there others out there that are doing the same thing and, again, using that sort of proximity? 0.53
00:37:44.000 Are they doing that in Cuba?
00:37:45.000 Are they doing it in Mexico, some of our other border countries, so to speak?
00:37:50.000 And who would those hostile actors be beyond those sort of three big ones, meaning Iran as well? 0.89
00:37:55.000 The Chinese are in Mexico up to their eyeballs in a variety of ways. 0.82
00:38:01.000 The Chinese relationship with Mexico is both legitimate commercial, electric vehicle kind of stuff, but also completely illegitimate with the sale of precursor chemicals for fentanyl production. 0.89
00:38:15.000 And Chinese chemists who embedded with the Sinaloa and CJNG cartels. 0.93
00:38:20.000 We saw them doing it when I was in office, teaching them how to make the fentanyl. 0.93
00:38:25.000 Now the cartels have their own chemists.
00:38:27.000 They're pretty self sufficient, but they're still getting those chemicals from China.
00:38:31.000 And then, of course, inside the United States, it's Chinese third party money launderers who are sweeping up the proceeds of the drug trade and depositing it into various US accounts and then selling those accounts abroad in China as a way of repatriating the money ultimately back to Mexico.
00:38:54.000 So, definitely the Chinese are caught up in, and it's at such a scale, it is completely impossible to argue that the Chinese central apparatus doesn't know that this is happening.
00:39:06.000 They know.
00:39:08.000 That would be the main, I mean, China's also in a number of other Latin American countries, particularly, you know, I mentioned satellite issues, they've got ground stations for satellites in several of these countries.
00:39:21.000 Russia, less so, because Russia has just been much more financially strapped for the past many years.
00:39:27.000 That they've had to scale back their presence.
00:39:29.000 And really, outside of Venezuela, where it was a big footprint for the Russians, it's Cuba.
00:39:36.000 So, you know, as we're seeing sort of this, you know, rightward shift across Latin America, a lot of elections kind of going that way.
00:39:36.000 Interesting.
00:39:43.000 It's looking even more so that way in Colombia as well, which had their runoff election and they had that coming up in just a couple of weeks.
00:39:51.000 You know, what is driving that?
00:39:52.000 Is it sort of interesting that once the USAID gravy train got shut off, we started seeing this trend?
00:40:00.000 Actually, accelerate.
00:40:01.000 How much do you think that really swayed those elections and the political affiliations of those countries over the years?
00:40:13.000 Well, I think that all of our friends in Latin America are very nationalistic in their own right.
00:40:23.000 They're very fiercely independent in their own right.
00:40:26.000 When you look at countries like Venezuela, which had the best human capital in terms of educated population of anywhere in In the region.
00:40:37.000 You mentioned all of the really entrepreneurial class that was in Cuba that was driven out.
00:40:43.000 These are societies that are not socialist inclined.
00:40:49.000 But they're societies that have been captured by the lure of socialism over the years.
00:40:56.000 And then, of course, the socialists take power, including, I mean, you can say this is also the case in terms of how they behave in this country.
00:41:04.000 Once they get into power, they begin doing everything possible to never lose power again.
00:41:09.000 And whether that's trying to jail their opponents or repressing the local populations or fabricating all kinds of legal actions.
00:41:20.000 I mean, Supreme Court packing, that's what Chavez did in Venezuela.
00:41:27.000 That's what people have been talking about doing here in the United States when they don't get a Supreme Court that rules the way they want.
00:41:33.000 So we have to beware of these authoritarian mechanisms, but people reject this stuff.
00:41:39.000 People want.
00:41:40.000 They want to be able to drive their own business.
00:41:40.000 Freedom.
00:41:43.000 They want to be able to take care of their families.
00:41:45.000 And that's why I think it's not a new phenomenon.
00:41:49.000 It's just with President Trump and with the drying up of the socialist gravy train that was feeding all these different regimes, you're starting to see the dominoes fall.
00:42:01.000 I'm excited about Colombia.
00:42:03.000 I'm hoping that we get a new regime in Cuba, a transitional government.
00:42:07.000 And by the way, don't forget Nicaragua. 0.89
00:42:10.000 Nicaragua is a horrible situation with Ortega and his wife, who really thinks she is a witch. 0.98
00:42:18.000 I kid you not. 0.82
00:42:19.000 Really? 1.00
00:42:19.000 She drinks blood. 1.00
00:42:21.000 Talk about this a little bit because we. 0.99
00:42:23.000 Steve's stone cold crazy. 0.99
00:42:29.000 And so they have been brutalizing the Nicaraguan people, terrorizing them. 0.99
00:42:33.000 They've been shooting at protesters.
00:42:36.000 They've dried up.
00:42:37.000 There's no free press there anymore. 0.91
00:42:39.000 Nicaragua's a horrible situation.
00:42:41.000 And I'm sure that domino tips over very quickly after Cuba. 0.99
00:42:44.000 Yeah, it's sort of interesting.
00:42:45.000 You mentioned sort of these people and their inclinations.
00:42:49.000 And it's always interesting to me, and I always say this because my mother went through it, who escaped what was then communist Czechoslovakia, and they came here.
00:42:55.000 You can never find someone to advocate for socialism or communism who actually lived under it.
00:43:02.000 Meaning, not that you went on vacation like Bernie Sanders to Moscow or something like that for a honeymoon and stuff like that, but people who actually lived under those things had to flee, were actual political refugees that needed asylum.
00:43:16.000 You never see those people in America actually advocating for those systems that they escaped.
00:43:20.000 Only the people who are like, You know, the academics who talk about these things in theory and how wonderful they should be.
00:43:24.000 And, you know, no, no, communism's going to succeed this time.
00:43:27.000 We've never done communism right.
00:43:30.000 You never see anyone doing that that actually lived under it.
00:43:33.000 It's sort of amazing to me.
00:43:36.000 You're so right.
00:43:37.000 I taught a course last spring at Florida International University, and almost all of the students were children of people who had fled various dictatorial regimes, mostly in Latin America.
00:43:52.000 And it was the most refreshing thing because we didn't have to go through why Marxism, communism, socialism is bad.
00:44:02.000 They knew it because their families had lived it.
00:44:05.000 And so, in your mind, that passed to that next generation as well?
00:44:09.000 Because, again, sometimes it's easy.
00:44:10.000 You get in America, you experience what we have to offer, and all of a sudden, if you're not the one that escaped, you can be propagandized like academia has done so well and so thoroughly over the last few decades.
00:44:25.000 Yeah, I mean, that's why it's so important with your children to pass on your perspectives based on your life experiences.
00:44:32.000 My example that I routinely reiterate with my two daughters, I was in the Pentagon on 9 11.
00:44:39.000 I was actually on the side of the building that they had wanted to hit, briefing then the Deputy Secretary of Defense.
00:44:48.000 So, talking to my daughters about 9 11 and about Al Qaeda and about what was happening in Afghanistan and so on, these are things we have to pass along.
00:44:57.000 By the way, I think this is why people, the American public, is so supportive of the operations against the Iranian regime. 0.91
00:45:05.000 Because when you look at how many American service members served and who either were injured, killed, or had friends who were injured or killed by the Iranians in Iraq, this is something that Main Street America just intuitively understands that the Iranian regime is a vicious, evil regime. 0.89
00:45:21.000 And so it's how we pass those experiences along. 0.78
00:45:26.000 My experience with the With the Hispanic community in Florida in particular, is that they do a very, very good job of that.
00:45:33.000 So, you know, if you were to sum it up, what do you think success looks like, you know, from a U.S. standpoint in these countries in both the short term and the long term?
00:45:43.000 So, I think the phased approach that is being used for Venezuela is the right approach.
00:45:47.000 You want stability and you don't want people being gunned down in the street.
00:45:53.000 But you want to then set the framework and a timetable to get to basically those different criteria that were laid out in the Helms Burton Act so many, many years ago, I think, the right criteria.
00:46:06.000 You want to free the political prisoners, right?
00:46:09.000 You want to allow for all political parties to participate.
00:46:13.000 You're not going to race right into an election, but you definitely want to get onto a timetable for it.
00:46:19.000 And you want to stop jailing people and you want to stop all the repression.
00:46:27.000 So I think those are the different things that we would want to be sure as we select a group of individuals in Cuba in particular, and as we look at what's left of the cartel in Venezuela.
00:46:44.000 In my mind, there are some that can certainly participate in the process.
00:46:48.000 Maybe Delcy's one of these.
00:46:49.000 For me personally, Diaz Dado, I think he absolutely belongs in a jail cell in the United States.
00:46:55.000 He was the guy who coordinated from Maduro to bring Hezbollah and Hamas to Venezuela.
00:47:01.000 He was the guy who was trying to kill Marco Rubio.
00:47:04.000 So I don't know with that guy if we can let bygones be bygones.
00:47:08.000 But I think you work towards an integration process with people that are committed to those criteria.
00:47:14.000 And that you do ultimately allow self-determination.
00:47:18.000 President Trump talks about a 51st state.
00:47:23.000 Cuba, very well, this may be a case where the Cubans themselves would love that idea.
00:47:29.000 We'd have to see.
00:47:31.000 You don't want to impose it on anybody.
00:47:33.000 But if we have a large expatriate community that decides to move back, who've been U.S. citizens, are U.S. citizens, have been living in the U.S. for multiple generations now, maybe we'll have a discussion about that in the coming.
00:47:47.000 In the coming months.
00:47:48.000 Interesting.
00:47:49.000 Well, Marshall Billingsley, thank you so much for being here.
00:47:52.000 Great to have you back on the show.
00:47:53.000 Really appreciate your insight.
00:47:54.000 And I'm sure as some of these things progress, we'll be talking to you again soon.
00:47:58.000 It's great to be with you again.
00:47:59.000 Thanks, Don.
00:48:00.000 And again, congratulations.
00:48:01.000 Thank you, man.
00:48:02.000 Appreciate it.
00:48:02.000 So, guys, thanks so much for tuning in.
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