Like George Washington crossing the Delaware to beat the Hessians as they rested on Christmas, the U.S. pulled off an incredible military operation capturing Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro in his pajamas.
Christmas week was rather a slow week, with the big news being the further unraveling of the corruption in Minnesota, Washington state, California, and other Democrat redoubts. But like George Washington crossing the Delaware to beat the Hessians as they rested on Christmas, the U.S. pulled off an incredible military operation capturing Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro in his pajamas and bringing him back here to answer to criminal charges. The Venezuelan military was largely on Christmas leave and Maduro’s international protectors --- the Chinese and Russian forces in Venezuela -- were caught flatfooted, diminishing their credibility in the Western Hemisphere. The impact of this operation was enormous.
One of the first published accounts of the operation was by our own Monica Showalter:
Drugs, election fraud, migrant warfare, a place for Venezuelans to return home to -- and above all, crushing the far left fountainhead itself. That is what this is about.
For 27 years, Venezuela's Marxist regime has spread its errors throughout the hemisphere, terrorizing governments, propping up the far left, bankrolling insurgents and assassins, supporting drug dealers, supporting Hez'ballah and its drug and terror operations, and supporting China with oil, too, so it can have enough of it to take out Taiwan.
Lots of pundits and military analysts are hailing back to Iraq, but this is not Iraq. This is about taking out a great plague of destabilization in the hemisphere, the ground zero of destabilization.
Some of its greatest hits began with the prophetic warning of former Venezuelan central banker Ruth Krivoy in a New York investment house around 2000, that Venezuela would seek to destabilize the region.
They were in the captured FARC computer of 2007, where Colombia's then-allied government learned that Venezuela was in way deeper than anyone realized in supporting these dangerous narcoterrorists who brought hell to Colombia.
There was the assassination in Chile of a military dissident by Venezuelan goon squads, and the fomenting of unrest in the streets there, too, as well as in Peru and Brazil.
There was the border surge against the U.S., including the emptying of Venezuela's prisons and the government involvement in the formation of its transnational gangs.
There were the many, many, stolen elections, starting in 2004, which has led the trend towards stolen elections in many countries of the world, including quite possibly the U.S.
Those days may be over.
You can count on the president’s critics to challenge this action -- in another magic trick the President will have them supporting Maduro, a thief, narco terrorist, and tyrant, but as Jonathan Turley notes, the president is well within his right to use military (as he did here) to support law enforcement. Maduro is in the custody of the Department of Justice to answer pending legal charges in the SDNY.
He was indicted in a four-count superseding indictment with Diosdado Cabello Rondón, 56, head of Venezuela’s National Constituent Assembly; Hugo Armando Carvajal Barrios aka “El Pollo,” 59, former director of military intelligence; Clíver Antonio Alcalá Cordones, 58, former General in the Venezuelan armed forces; Luciano Marín Arango aka “Ivan Marquez,” 64, a member of the FARC’s Secretariat, which is the FARC’s highest leadership body; and Seuxis Paucis Hernández Solarte aka “Jesús Santrich,” 53, a member of the FARC’s Central High Command, which is the FARC’s second-highest leadership body.
This operation will be justified as executing the criminal warrant and responding to an international drug cartel, a very similar legal framework to the one used against Noriega. There is precedent supporting that earlier operation, which will now be used to defend the actions in Venezuela. [snip]
Trump does not need congressional approval for this type of operation. Presidents, including Democratic presidents, have launched lethal attacks regularly against individuals. President Barack Obama killed an American citizen under this “kill list” policy. If Obama can vaporize an American citizen without even a criminal charge, Trump can capture a foreign citizen with a pending criminal indictment without prior congressional approval.
Ordinarily, the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations and other international agreements require the United States to notify the embassy of a foreign national arrested and held in the United States. Notice seems a tad superfluous in this case. [snip]
The Noriega case offers ample support for the Trump Administration, which has had an outstanding arrest warrant [for Maduro] for over five years. He is not viewed as the duly elected leader of Venezuela and has been tied to a criminal drug cartel.
The action will also have a major impact on foreign policy. The Monroe Doctrine just became the Trump Doctrine. This action not only confronted Venezuela but also Cuba, which was supplying the security around Maduro. Presumably, Cuban security may have been involved in the firefight. While cutting off vital oil to Cuba, the Trump Administration just delivered a blow against the Cuban regime -- arguably one of the most stinging defeats since crushing the Cuban forces in Grenada in 1983.
Legally, Trump has the upper hand in this case. Maduro will replay the arguments from the Noriega case. However, he presents an even weaker case on the merits under the controlling precedent than did Noriega.
Here, besides the impact on Cuba, are some of the consequences of the Maduro action:
- It decouples South America from Russia, Iran, and China. All their forces in Venezuela were unable to respond to this decapitation strike. This means they have lost all credibility as protectors of tyrants in this hemisphere.
- Hugo Chavez and Maduro together have cost us dearly. They seized billions of dollars of U.S. assets which we aim to recover and they flooded the U.S. with drugs and criminals. The drug shipments were halted by targeted strikes on boats transporting them here, and the criminal transport has ended with our closing Biden’s open borders.
- Iran, which profited from assistance to its proxies Hezb’allah and Hamas, has lost an ally and the economic ties to Maduro. More importantly, as more Venezuelan oil is marketed, risk premiums on oil will be lowered and Iran and Russia will reap far smaller profits on the sale of their oil, leaving Russia pressed to continue its high-cost fight in Ukraine and Iran less able to fund terrorism.
- China will lack an oil source it needs if it were to follow through on its threats to invade Taiwan.
- Domestically, it means Venezuelans who fled here will be able to return home and rebuild. It also means we may get proof of Venezuela’s role in undermining election integrity here.
As remarkable as this operation was -- in contrast to the capture of Noriega which took weeks and a thousand lives, this took one night and no casualties– it took place as the protests against the mullahs grows. President Trump tweeted a threat -- saying that if Iran shoots the protesters we will “come to their rescue. We are locked and loaded and ready to go.” I take this as a threat to Iran’s military. A threat made more menacing to the mullahs by this action. There are many videos from inside Iran showing the massive, continuing street demonstrations. While there has been some lethal response, so far there has been no indication of military involvement. Before these demonstrations, the Iran Revolutionary Guards (the mullahs SS) suffered some significant blows when a number of their headquarters were targeted.
An Iranian collapse and a Venezuela collapse, without actual U.S. military intervention, would be the best-case scenario for U.S. and world security since the end of WWII. Add Cuba, and the world changes massively. As much as it helps America, it is essential to the people in those amazing countries who have dealt with horrific and brutal leadership for generations.
If all this weren’t significant enough, the massive welfare fraud uncovered in Minnesota this week is now undeniable. Some but not all of it is detailed in this affidavit filed December 18 of last year in support of a search of Minnesota records. If that weren’t sufficient to expose vast corruption, the efforts of independent journalist Nick Shirley have made clear in a series of videos published on YouTube how blatant the fraud has been. The groundwork for the White House has been laid to continue to press for accountability, to cut off funds being used in pay-to-play election fraud, and to reduce the national debt by cutting funds to suspect outfits and fraudulent objectives. I anticipate criminal charges against Minnesota’s officials.
If anti-welfare moves succeed, taxpayers will have more of their own funds to spend as they chose, instead of handing it over to politicos who transfer it to scammers in exchange for receiving a percentage back in contributions and votes.
Among the cut off of funds to Minnesota this week, ”The Trump SBA just SUSPENDED 6,900 Minnesota borrowers due to suspected PPE and EIDL loan fraud with half a BILLION DOLLARS Holy smokes. Fraud is being uncovered every day at this point. DEFUND MINNESOTA!”
The link between illegal voting and welfare handouts to illegals is obvious.
“I crunched the data. I made a map. States with no effective voter ID requirement average nearly 8x more welfare benefits to illegal immigrants compared to states requiring voter ID verification. They are importing and paying illegals for votes.”
Shirley’s work has encouraged an army of Davids, doing the same job tracking down blatant welfare fraud in other jurisdictions.
I cannot imagine any other president having the guts to tackle this widespread thievery. Neither can Scott Adams:
I can't imagine any other president fixing the massive fraud problem. First, he had to dismantle the DEI mind virus. Second, he had to not be in on the scams, directly or indirectly. Third, you need balls of steel to block these good-sounding-but-corrupt schemes.
There’s every incentive for taxpayers to get involved. For one thing, the cost of this welfare fraud is enormous.
this is shocking: > US collects $2.4T in income tax, but spends $1.5T on fraud > if we didn't have to pay for fraud, only $900b would need to be collected > this means anyone with less 500k in income could pay *literally $0* in income tax we don't need to raise taxes. we need to cut fraud.
This is staggering: -- the US collects more income tax than the *entire national budget* of every country except China -- and we lose more in fraud than the entire budget of all but four. So, money is clearly not the issue. Politicians raise taxes not because it’s needed, but because it gives them a bigger slush fund to enrich groups who will vote for them. They fund luxury hotels for illegal immigrants, while working families can barely afford healthcare. It’s treasonous, corrupt, and evil. This is how empires fall.
All indications are that the fraud in Minnesota is eclipsed by far in California, which should set off alarms in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Sacramento. Newsom is likely to make Tim Walz’s pelf seem minuscule by contrast. As Victor Davis Hanson reports:
Gavin Newsom now has 8 separate agencies officially designated as “high risk for waste, fraud, abuse, or mismanagement” in California Roughly $76 billion in fraud, improper payments and mismanagement was discovered by the auditor Let me repeat that, $76 BILLION “Representative Kevin Kiley stood on the House floor and stated what California’s own audit confirms: California is the fraud capital of America. Not hyperbole, not partisan exaggeration, a mathematical certainty derived from the state’s own accounting. The number of agencies designated as high risk for waste, fraud, abuse, or mismanagement has doubled under Newsom’s tenure. Eight separate agencies now carry this designation, meaning they exhibit serious fiscal pathologies and have failed to implement adequate corrective actions despite repeated warnings.
-- The Employment Development Department that dispensed $32 billion to fraudsters
-- The Department of Social Services overseeing CalFresh benefits, hemorrhaging billions in improper payments
-- The Department of Finance that lost track of $24 billion in homelessness funds
-- The California High-Speed Rail Authority burning through $18 billion with nothing to show but environmental studies and abandoned construction sites.
These are not discrete failures, but systemic collapse manifesting across every major function of state government.
If you want to help check these scams, consider filing evidence of them and recovering under the False Claims Act. Bring an anti-fraud action on the government’s behalf, and if the suit is successful, you share in the proceeds recovered. There are groups which will work with you to process justified claims charging fraud on the government.
There's a way to make a 1000x return on fraud prevention, @Chamath, but it's not through the bond market. The False Claims Act (qui tam) says anyone who uncovers fraud can sue the fraudster on behalf of the government, and keep 15-30% of the recovery. On a billion-dollar fraud, that's $150M+ for a private whistleblower. My startup, @AntifraudCo, does this on a repeatable basis. We have some fixed costs (salaries, tech, rent), but amortized over each case we file, we easily get a 1000x return on investment. @AntifraudCo is essentially a decentralized, private-sector capitalist DOGE that has unparalleled margins & ROI, while also doing social good.
We are so fortunate to have Trump. Maduro has been removed and is facing trial here; drug overdose deaths are plummeting; homicides are plummeting; the mullahs are collapsing (without war), the border is closed; widespread fraud is being exposed, and the least Congress can do to right our ship of state is to demand election integrity.
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2026/01/what_a_way_to_start_2026.html
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