Speaker 1: And hello, how are you doing. Happy Wednesday to you
on this seventh day of January, year of all our
twenty twenty six. My name is Tom Sullivan, and we've
got a lot to go over today. It's been a
very busy, very busy news day today, and it started
off with everybody still following up on new there's new information,
new news every day about Venezuela. And we've got Venezeuela,
and we've got protest going on in Iran. We've got
you want to buy Greenland, you want to take it over.
We've got takeover of another couple of ships today. And
it's the one year anniversary of the La fire. So
I guess we should start with what happened today in Minneapolis.
There was a protest going on Minneapolis. They're doing ICE
is doing a surge in Minneapolis. They've got according to
the Mayor of Minneapolis, they've got two thousand ICE agents
have been assigned. ICE hasn't said that, so I don't
know if that's the right number, but apparently there's a
surge of ICE agents that have been sent to Minneapolis
to round up people that are illegally in this country
and doing so. There was a group of people, a
fairly large group of people protesting where the ICE agents
were in a neighborhood trying to they had a target
they were going after somebody, and people found out about
this and they started gathering and a woman, thirty seven
year old woman had a mini suv and she it
looked like I guess you could say, she looked like
she was trying to do a U turn on a
city street. And this is where the ICE agents and
their pickup trucks and vans were coming, and so essentially
she blocked the street. Was she trying to do a
U turn or not? I kind of doubted. I think
she was trying to block them. So two ICE agents
get out of a pickup truck and walk up to
the door and try to open the door to get
her out, take her into custody for blocking the obstruction
of justice. But there was another ICE agent that was
kind of standing near the front fender of this mini suv,
and the woman started to turn to go down the
road to unblock the road and went toward this Ice
agent and he opened up with gunfire and killed her.
So the chaos after that has gone way way up.
When I first heard about this, I thought, well, one
of the things I've seen people do. They with their cars,
they try to run down a police officer, police that
are trying to apprehend them, stop them, whatever it might be.
I got a tip from Tom for you don't do
that because you will get shot. That is automatic. If
police feel that you are trying to run them over,
they are in life danger, they will shoot you. So
I finally saw the video late this afternoon of what
of what happened, and it's a little more nuanced. It's
not that she was trying to run this guy down,
I don't think, but he might have thought she was.
In any case, So there's going to be we got
another Minneapolis problem. And I don't know what's going to
It's cold, so maybe the riders won't be out there
like they were with George Floyd. But uh, there's the
chaos indicator has gone to the moon in Minneapolis this afternoon.
Let's go to Let's go to Venezuela, because we've got Venezuela,
we got the oil, We've got the fact that the
President announced today that Venezuela is going to give to
the United States thirty to fifty million barrels of oil.
That's a lot of oil. That's about two billion dollars
worth of oil of today's market price. And then you
get into the whole question about are we there to
stop drugs or are we there to execute an arrest warrant?
Are we there to change regimes? Are we I mean,
there's all these we don't know and and the Trumpet
administration really has been mixed messaging on what it is
all about. No question, they had a warrant for the
arrest of Maduro. That one's pretty easy. The question about
the oil, you've got to go back to the seventies
when this all started, and then Chavez bumped it up
even more in the nineties. But they stole, they stole
oil company's property and they're oil. And that is why
there are sanctions on Venezuelan oil for them money to
be paid back to the companies that they stole their
assets and oil in the ground. So with all of this,
thirty to fifty million barrels will be given to the
United States by Venezuela. And that's just the first. Once
that's completed, they'll do it again. It's basically endless. And
the rest of this is is that the sanctions then
will be dramatically relaxed. In other words, this Venezuelan oil
can now be sold to other people in the Western Hemisphere.
No more selling to China, no more doing business with
Iran and Russia. This is going to be a whole
new world for them, and they seem to be going
along with it just fine. The question then, has been
raised about the woman who is the appointed president, the
former vice president under Maduro. Her name is Delsey Rodriguez.
And the thing that's starting to be the buzz that's
coming out This is not official, but the buzz is
that she was the insider intel for us to figure
out where Madua was, what his schedule was, where he lived,
how to get into his house. All of that. That
she was the intel source for the United States, and
that may lead to why instead of putting up the
opposition candidates that won the election back in a year ago,
they decided to keep Delsea Rodriguez in place. Maybe it's
as a payment to thank you for helping us pick
up Maduro. This is all nobody's saying this officially, but
a lot of people are talking about the fact that
she looks like she may have been picked to be
the continuing president of Venezuela because she didn't like what
Madua was doing, so she helped us. So as we
go along with all of this, President Trump was taught
looking about getting the oil and then the money from
the oil that with the thirty to fifty million barrels
would be given to the United States, and that Donald
Trump will personally determine where this money goes. Now it
goes into US banks, we don't know which ones, and
then Trump will decide, he said, where this money goes.
That some of it will benefit the United States, some
of it will benefit the people of Venezuela. And I
think if we don't want to look like the big
world global bullies, we better make sure to try and
rebuild the goodwill of the people of the country. If
you don't have the people behind you, you're going to
have lots of problems. So here is what the President
said early this morning.
Speaker 2: We're going to have our very large United States oil companies,
the biggest anywhere in the world, go in spend billions
of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure,
and start making money for the country.
Speaker 1: Well, actually, there's oil companies that are bigger than ours
in other parts of the world. But that's a side comment.
The other part behind this is what about the oil companies.
They're not going to be very enthused about going in
to an unstable country that has burned them at least twice,
taking their assets in the past, billions of dollars of
assets and all of the oil that was under where
they had claims. So a professor of South American oil
just study area out of Rice University of Francisco, Madaldi,
was asked about this whole idea about US oil companies
just running in there and investing billions of dollars.
Speaker 3: Well, I don't think that it's clear exactly what he means.
But you know, Venezuela would require about one hundred billion
dollars of investment to go back to the levels of
pig production, as you mentioned by the end of the
nineteen nineties. But that will require a complete overhaul of
the institutional system. It would require a legitimate government. You know,
it will require long term horizons for investors. Investors have
been burned in Venezuela many, many times by contract renegging
and changes in the tax system, and these control by
the national company. So I think it will take some
significant amount of time for those investments to come.
Speaker 1: The President said it will take eighteen months, and that
he mentioned one time. He's only mentioned at once that
the US taxpayer will reimburse the US oil companies for
their expenses of getting this whole country set back up again,
and then it will won't take only take eighteen months.
You heard what the professor said, and he's not alone.
Just about everybody in the oil patch is talking about
it'll take one hundred billion dollars and probably ten years
before you get then as whale oil production back to
what it was before they started nationalizing. You're taking away
these assets. So what about some of these oil companies, professor, But.
Speaker 3: Other companies that are not in the country, like say
Conocle or Excellon, that are owed money by the Venezuelan government,
they will have to first of all look for opportunities,
see the contracts, how they are offered, what is the
fiscal regime, a variety of things, and then they will
have to analyze if the political risks make it worth
it to sink billions of dollars before they see the
first revenue. And finally, there might be some smaller companies
that are willing to go into fields that are currently
operated by the national company and that already have all
the infrastructure and just make a quick box by investing
in some in drilling some weals. But that's not going
to make the big difference that we're talking about that
recovering the oil industry of Venezuela. Actually it's very compatible
because the refineries in the Golf Coast were optimized to
process that type of oil because Mexico and Venezuela were
supposed to be increasing production, you know, in the nineteen nineties,
and so the US has mostly light oil and the
other source of heavy oil, which is Canada, it cannot
get easily to the Golf Coast. There is no infrastructure
because Keystone Excel was never built. So the refineries in
Texas and Louisiana are really eager to get some of
the heavy oil that Venezuela produces.
Speaker 1: I don't mind. There's a lot of work and a
lot of speculation and billions one hundreds of one hundred
billion dollars over the next ten years. It won't be
eighteen months. It's going to be a long grind to
get there. Brett McGirk former national security guy talking about
Venezuela and this idea of us getting their oil.
Speaker 4: The where that comes to mind after the very successful
operation in Caracas this weekend. The word that keeps coming
to my mind is hubris, because when you have a
successful operation like that, I think there's a risk to
think that, Wow, look at that, we took some risk.
It was very successive. We were so decisive, and now
let's think of what else we can do. And since
that operation, you've had President Trump talking about Columbia, Cuba,
and now Greenland, and I just I mean that clip
is very important because Venezuela is, to say the least,
very unfinished. It's very uncertain. Nobody can really articulate where
this is going. We've taken on a huge piece of
business there. We do not want to get sucked into
something that we can't handle. And I think you have
to prioritize and focus on that. Otherwise you're going to
become just totally unconstrained and lose prioritization. That is very risky.
That's why hubris keeps coming to mind. Greenland had really
not been discussed over the last six months. It's back
now after the operation in Venezuela and the operation in Venezuela.
At least Kate does have a colorable legal basis. There
was a warrant for Madore, there's a twenty five million
dollar bounty on his head, even from the Biden administration.
All that talk about these other countries and just the
raw exertion of power in our hemisphere I think is
very dangerous and at risk fracturing those alliances that actually
make America strong. So focus on what matters here. Venezuela
very important, Ukraine, keep working on that deal, and then
there's a huge global agenda that is coming with massive velocity.
President Trump will have a somewhat Washesion ping in the spring,
Taiwan Gaza, which Brock knows so well about all these issues,
and of course Iran and the protests still going on
in Iran. Very serious, massive global agenda, and just try
to stay focused here. We don't need to be moving
on Greenland right now.
Speaker 1: So he's telling the President stay focus, and I find
he has a little trouble with that, But we'll see
how this works out. Basically, at this point, it's still
we're only a couple of days into this, and there's
a lot of questions about how this is all going
to turn out. So meantime, we picked up two ships today.
One of them is the ship called Bela I, and
this is one that tried to evade the blockade around
Venezuela a week and a half or so ago before Maduro,
and it took off on the run, and our navy
and Coastguard had been following in it and they haven't
been able to take it under our control until today.
It was on its way. It was halfway between Newfoundland
and France up in the North Atlantic, so it had
traveled quite some distance in the last week and a half.
They in the meantime they changed their flag from Portugal
to Russia, and they changed their name to Maderia as
opposed to Bela one. It's an empty ship, and the
question is what was that ship doing. He was probably
going to pick up Venezuelan oil and then sail off
to China and sell it there. We don't know right now,
but that ship, we finally took it under our possession today.
The other ship is a Sophia, is a ship that
was also a mystery ship. And these are all these
ghost ships that are being run. We're being run by
Venezuela or Russia. And this other ship, Sofia, is an
empty ship sailing toward Venezuela. And we don't know why
it was empty, probably to pick up some oil. But
who was on that ship? Why was that ship going
where it was? Nick Robertson, who is based in London,
has kind of the basics of the story.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 6: Over the last few days, US Air Force has been
flying PA to surveillance aircraft tracking this ship as it
came into the Northern Atlantic. It's been heading sort of
skirting wide of Ireland, heading up towards Iceland and that
sort of gap to go towards the north of Russia,
the Arctic Circle. Marine tracking experts believe a vessel of
this size was likely headed towards moments that was the
track that it was on, but that all came to
a sudden, screeching halt about two and a half hours ago.
Marine trackers noticing that the ship turned direction at that moment.
And this really comports with the information we're getting now
that the ship has been seized by US military and
Coast Guard. It has been tracked closely by them, as
we say, since it fled the coast of Venezuela about
two weeks ago. What makes this even more interesting, if
you will, The ship, when it started its journey two
weeks ago was called the Bella. One halfway along that route,
it changed its name to the Marinera and reflagged itself
as Russian. Not clear. Why were they trying to get
protection from Russia? Was always Russian? Unclear? The port that
had appeared to be headed for in the past couple
of days does appear to have been a Russian port,
But now that ship has turned around, no longer heading
north for the last couple of hours, heading south. Not
clear where it will end up. It is believed to
be empty, or at least devoid of oil. We don't
know what else or who else may be on board
of it, but certainly enough for Russia to deploy military
assets to try to give it some shadow of some
kind of protection, and clearly not enough to deter the
US Coast Guard and the US military assets that seized
it a few hours ago.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's the part about Russia that was interesting, is
that Russia has some interest in this because they were
desperately trying to protect this ship. They had a Russian submarine,
uh at sailine under the water right next to the ship.
Speaker 5: Uh.
Speaker 1: They have they had. There was a couple of ships
as well Finland and Sweden interdicted to other ships that
were trying to cut cables out out of Finland and
out of Sweden. So Russia is all of a sudden
very active in all of this.
Speaker 6: Uh.
Speaker 1: The second ship that was seized was seized in the Caribbean.
It was part of the ghost fleet moving h Venezuelan
oil to probably China. Thomas Shannon, former Under Secretary of State,
talks about this whole business of Venezuelan oil and their
and their ghost ships.
Speaker 7: Well, the seizure of this tanker is part of a
larger effort to stop ghost ships and stop black market
transfers of oil. And it's something the President and this
ad themistration has committed himself in itself too. It's dramatic
in terms of the way and it's being done, and
it generates a potential confrontation with Russia, with China, with
Iran and others who are benefiting from this kind of activity.
But the role that the UK has played and the
role that others have and will play in this is
important in an effort to create greater transparency in the
flow of oil and gas through the international markets, but
especially the revenues that come from them.
Speaker 1: So the oil revenues from the ghost ships has essentially
been they're trying to shut it off. Probably at this
point they're pretty successful with it. So whoever is on
the other end of this getting the money, getting the
oil is all of a sudden going to be looking
around and finding their pockets are empty. So you've got
all of that going on with Venezuela and the ghost ships,
and you've got Greenland and the question about Greenland. This
is so basi are because of the fact that we
have an agreement from nineteen fifty one, right after the
end of World War Two, in which we entered into
an agreement with Denmark and Greenland that we could move
in there as many soldiers and troops and set up
forts and build military bases and do whatever we want
to do. They said, you can do whatever you want
to do. Come one, come all. And they were very
combat more than accommodating. And so we don't need to
buy them, we don't need to use our military to go,
I don't know, take them over somehow. They're Basically the
gates are open to us and they welcome us. Brett
McGirk again talks a little bit about this.
Speaker 4: If I within the Oval office with a president, any president,
you asked what exactly do you want us to achieve?
Speaker 1: And then how?
Speaker 4: And when it comes to Greenland, it is true the
strategic contested area of the Arctic with global warm with
Russia China investing massively in these ice breaking ships, it's
an important strategic area. But here's the good news. Denmark
is part of basically a NATO ally. We have a
treaty with Denmark from nineteen fifty one that basically allows
us to have any military presence we want in Denmark.
We have standing committees about military presence, security presence in
Greenland and also about access to resources, trade and everything.
So anything we might want to do in Greenland, and
it is strategic territory, we can do through our friends
and allies in Denmark. And I have to say I
have built international coalitions and Denmark is one of our
best allies. When everyone is something really hard, whether it
was ships in the Red Sea, whether it was actually
military forces to go into the heart of Iraq in
the worst days of isis. I used to go to
Copenhagen because Denmark is one of our staunchest allies. So
whatever we want in Greenland, it is strategic, that is true.
Pick up the phone and talk to the Danes and
I think you'll have a very receptive conversation. We can
get everything we want because it's a NATO ally and
one of our strongest allies.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I don't know what all this chaos is about. Wanting
to take Greenland militarily or by buying Greenland, whichever version
you want to hear. Rubio is talking about buying it.
Steven Miller is talking about taking it over. They're already
welcoming us in. There isn't a problem. All right, We've
got a lot to cover today. Let's get to Let's
get to the LA fires. It's been one year. Been
one year since the fires took out twelve thousand homes
in Los Angeles, both the Eton and the Pacific Palisades fire.
Twelve thousand homes, thirty one people were killed. Since then,
been one year, there is for there have been fourteen
hundred permits to build, so that's about ten little more
than ten percent. LA just has mud all over their face.
They drained the reservoir for some reason for maintenance, and
it was right in the height of the fire season.
They had forty five fire engines that were in their
repair yard. Weather predictions were high the high Santa Ana winds,
which are very changerous for fire. The mayor Mayor Karen
Bass left the fire chief was eventually fired. She claimed
they pre deployed fire trucks and they did not. They
left the January first fire to smolder, which later is
considered to be the start of the fire. And Governor
Knewsom and Karen Bass were asked about how are things
going out there in.
Speaker 4: La costliest wildfire event in American history? Where are we
at in the recovery effort.
Speaker 7: We made tremendous problems, the fastest to pre removal in
American history, at least modern American history.
Speaker 8: In six months, people are still out of their homes.
It doesn't make anybody feel wonderful for me to sit
here and tell you that this is one of the
fastest recovery and rebuilding efforts that the state of California
has ever seen. And I'm proud of that.
Speaker 1: She's proud of it. But the homeowners are so frustrated,
beyond frustrated. So they've had roughly ten percent of the
homes that were destroyed have had permits issued for them
to rebuild, but then they got to go through even
more hoops, over and over and over again. And Newsom
is proud of the fact that they the fastest debris
clearing that has ever been done in modern history. Well
that's nice, but what have you done about getting to
people back in their homes. Trish Allison, a professional photographer,
lived in Pacific Palisades. She lost her home and she
was asked about her reflections one year later.
Speaker 5: It's a bit surreal, and honestly, I'm kind of heartbroken
to hear the whole package before this because it brings
back everything. A year has passed, but it also feels
like only six seconds have passed. There's been really no
development at all. So many of my friends are stuck,
So many of my friends can't move back. Everything has
been absolute hell, to be honest, and the progress is
very slow, and it just is devastating for our whole community,
and my heart just breaks for my entire town.
Speaker 1: Besides her house, she also lost her business, but she
also lost her neighborhood. And her life. I mean, a home,
a roof of over your head is important, but it's
more than that. It's about your community, your neighbors, the
grocery store you like. Here's back to Trish Allison.
Speaker 5: Thankfully my career, I'm mobile, right, so I'm a photographer
and I primarily work with families and children. So the
schools that I work with have been so supportive and
I've been able to, you know, recoup my business. Although
you know, I lost my home studio, I've been able
to go on the road. I'm on the road way
more than I was before, but I go to where
the work is, and so I'm very grateful for that.
Speaker 1: She was also asked for her assessment about giving an
assessment grade to the governor and the mayor, the governor
of California, the mayor of Los Angeles.
Speaker 5: Unfortunately, I have no faith in our officials. I don't
see any leadership that's come out of the on the
state level or the city level. I feel like there's
a complete lack of accountability, a complete lack of transparency.
Lies after lies, everyone pointing the finger at someone else,
completely absolving themselves to responsibility. True leaders should stand up
admit faults where there is fault, improve on that for
the next future disaster which will come. The fact is
fire has happen. I don't care what causes them. I
don't care if it's arsonists, I don't care if it's
climate change. Fires happen. City officials jobs are to protect
those that elected them. That did not happen on so
many levels. There was no water in the reservoir, There
was no action taking place for using deductors in the
fire trucks to use standing water from pools. So many
things burned on day two when there was no wind,
no one was there. It makes absolutely no sense. We
were literally left to burn with no one taking responsibility,
nothing being learned from this, and so many people being
displaced and never being able to come back to their home.
And that's devastating loss. And I don't want to hear
about the fast debris removal clearance. Yes, armu cor came
in most of those houses, had to then hire private
de pre removal because they didn't finish the jobs. They
cleared out what they wanted to and left and you
get no say in that. So it's a little bit
of a joke.
Speaker 1: There was an interesting connection between this story and the
fraud story of Minnesota. The governor of Minnesota, Tim Walltz
and the Attorney General Keith Ellison, and I don't know
how many more are passing the buck on the billions
and billions of dollars worth of fraud. They're pointing the
finger at everybody. They're not taking any responsibility. The governor said,
I'm the governor. I take responsibility and then went on
to blame anybody and everybody that happened to be walking by.
That's the same thing in Los Angeles. The governor of
California and the mayor of Los Angeles are both They've
got they've got all kinds of guilt all over them,
and they're not taking any any any responsibility or accountability.
So I guess that's why the Harry Truman signed on
his desk. The buck stops here is something that lives
on for many, many decades because that's not the way
most politicians work. Also in Los Angeles, today Nick Reiner
had a court appearance. It was an arraignment, was supposed
to be an arraignment today and instead there was a
surprise because this was the initial arrangement arraignment for the
murder of his parents, Rob and Michelle Reiner. So the
case was delayed because the defense lawyer, Alan Jackson, withdrew today,
citing it was very complex and there were serious issues.
So the judge in the case appointed lead a deputy
public defender Kimberly Green is her name, as appointed as
the new defense council for Nick Reiner. He spoke briefly
confirming that he waved his right to a speedy arrangement.
The new hearing is focusing on the defense wants time
to do their investigation and the serious nature of the case,
whatever that means, because it looked like it's pretty open
and shut. But legal experts are debating whether or not
a potential insanity defense might arise. Paul Morrow, who is
a lawyer, weighed on.
Speaker 9: This, accused me, Yeah, this is the read that I'm getting.
The insanity defense is tough, all right, so very high bar.
It has to be mental defect. You didn't understand that
what you did is wrong. The problem for them is
that he fled the scene after the homicides, indicating that
he knew what he did was wrong, so that you know,
that's a problem there. Jackson is talking about. This is
going to be very complicated. This is a jaction is
a defense attorney. There's going to be a long case.
There's a lot of complexities.
Speaker 3: Excuse me.
Speaker 9: What he's going to say is medication. He was on medication,
skewed his brain, and that could drop it from murder
one to murder two because they can play with the premeditation.
Speaker 1: So that was before we found out that Alan Jackson,
the lawyer that was touted as being a superstar lawyer,
he withdrew today because of again he said, because of
the very complex and serious issues and doesn't seem like
it's all that much, but he said he cited the
cases complexity. The court appointed Kimberly Green. The defense has
requested the sealed subpoenas indicating deep investigation into very complex
and serious issues. I can see that they will go
either insanity or maybe go down the road of they
changed prescription medicine on him. We've talked about this before.
There have been lots of cases where people have had
psychotropic drugs that have been changed and they go right
off the rails. So this whole thing is big superstar
lawyer that I'm out. I'm not going to do this one.
So on Wallstreet today. We set all those records yesterday,
so we undid some of it. We did some profit
taking today. The dow down four hundred and sixty six.
The dow at forty eight nine ninety six, by the way,
is making a run towards fifty thousand. Every time I've
seen the odometer change on Wall Street for decades, it
gets up there, it gets closed at backs off, It
gets up there, gets closed at backs off. It does
it two three, four times, maybe takes a couple of weeks,
and then it breaks through. So we'll see if that
repeats in this particular effort. SMP down twenty four, NASDAK
up thirty seven. Price of gold fell twenty nine dollars
to forty four sixty seven, and oil fell a buck
down to fifty six dollars for one barrel of oil.
Thank you for stopping by today, and we will be
back again tomorrow. Hope to see you there.